{"id":25904,"date":"2021-09-19T01:01:20","date_gmt":"2021-09-19T05:01:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/?p=25904"},"modified":"2022-08-01T07:42:43","modified_gmt":"2022-08-01T11:42:43","slug":"thoughts-large-76","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/2021\/09\/thoughts-large-76\/","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts @ Large: 76"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2261\u00a0 Whenever I ask Alexa, set a timer for 5 minutes<\/em> (typically when I am grilling burgers), I’m always surprised how quickly those few minutes pass.\u00a0 It’s like, wow, already?\u00a0 I hardly had time to sit down, and now you’re telling me those minutes are gone.\u00a0 Good thing Alexa is not sitting on our shoulders, timing what remains of our lives.<\/p>\n

\u2261\u00a0 If you were to live on Wild Magnolia Way near Zirconia, North Carolina — specifically at the coordinates 35.1653N, 82.4559W<\/a> — you could walk 1300 feet north, 1300 feet south, 1300 feet east, or 1300 feet west, and in each case, for better or worse, you would wind up in South Carolina.\u00a0 (OK.\u00a0 It would be worse.\u00a0 Sorry, not really, South Carolina.)<\/p>\n

\u2261\u00a0 By the way, the previous “thought” took me over an hour to research.\u00a0 Good thing Alexa was not sitting on my shoulder, timing how much of my life ticked past on that exercise.<\/p>\n

\u2261\u00a0 In Being a Ballerina<\/em>: The Power and Perfection of a Dancing Life<\/em><\/a>, Gavin Larsen writes: “The curse of being a good faker is that people begin to think you’re for real, and then they expect things.”\u00a0 For many, the next step along this path is self-deprecation, our indirect way of saying, “Please don’t expect anything more of me than I expect of myself.”<\/p>\n

\u2261\u00a0 The reverse side of this coin is impostor syndrome: <\/em>they expected things of me, and those things were delivered, so they judged me to be competent even though the outcome was uncertain and only partly due to my effort.\u00a0 I got more credit than I deserved for the fortune of working with good people.\u00a0 Damn expectations, the curse of transactional life.<\/p>\n

\u2261\u00a0 I was just notified that MailChimp, the (free-to-me) service I use to send update notices to my subscribers, is selling itself to Intuit, owner of TurboTax and QuickBooks.\u00a0 Somehow I will not be surprised the day I’m told that I will have to pay for the privilege of letting you know something new has been posted here.\u00a0 As always, money marches on.<\/p>\n

\u2261\u00a0 Here’s a good one.\u00a0 I’m always impatient to have my first cup of coffee after I wake up.\u00a0 Last night, to speed up the process, I decided I would pre-fill the carafe with water and put the filter in the coffee-maker basket so that I wouldn’t have to fumble around with those tasks in the morning.\u00a0 All I would have to do is grind the coffee, dump it into the basket, empty the carafe into the reservoir, and turn on the machine.\u00a0 So fast-forward to this morning.\u00a0 I go through the motions of making coffee and then sit down in the family room to wait, and voil\u00e0!\u00a0 I’m amazed how fast the coffee-maker beeps to let me know my coffee is ready!\u00a0 I go back out to the kitchen to find cool, clear water sitting in the carafe.<\/p>\n

\u2261\u00a0 The world would be a happier place if people didn’t get so bent out of shape when their expectations were not met.\u00a0 When exactly did perfectionism become not only a thing but an entitlement?<\/p>\n

\u2261\u00a0 There needs to be a set of words for forms of government that are distinguished by the fact that men<\/em> define them and control them.\u00a0 For example, theoman<\/strong>ocracy<\/em> is the kind of government you find in places like Iran, Saudi Arabia and Vatican City.\u00a0 And then there is demoman<\/strong>ocracy, <\/em>whose most notable example is the U.S.A. — the 88th-ranked nation in terms of women’s participation in congress\/parliament (23%).\u00a0 But let’s not forget about commuman<\/strong>ism<\/em> as practiced in the People’s Republic of China — there is only one woman <\/a>in their 25-member Politburo and no women at all in their 7-member leadership circle.<\/p>\n

\u2261\u00a0 If you are looking a word for forms of government distinguished by the fact that women define them and control them, then I can supply it — none-ocracies.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2261\u00a0 I was rear-ended at an on-ramp in early June.\u00a0 My vehicle had under 4000 miles on it, thus ended my new-car honeymoon.\u00a0 The parts to complete the repair took two months to arrive, so the work was just finished this week.\u00a0 Since the crash, I have become paranoid about other vehicles ramming into me from behind — I find myself constantly checking my rear-view mirror for drivers talking on their phones who don’t care about attention spans or stopping distances.\u00a0 What am I supposed to do about them?\u00a0 It signifies a huge loss of social trust when drivers are forced to manage the space behind them as carefully as the space ahead.<\/p>\n

\u2261\u00a0 Not long ago, my spouse noticed a highly-agitated person in the parking lot of our local supermarket, talking to himself.\u00a0 She was concerned about his well-being (as well as those he might encounter) but she did not know who to call so he might get help.\u00a0 After hearing her story, I was compelled to look into this — who would I call?\u00a0 How would they respond?\u00a0 There is no clear answer to either question, at least in these parts.\u00a0 What about in yours?\u00a0 This topic is much more than a “thought” and will be taken up again in a future post.<\/p>\n

\u2261\u00a0 Handbook of Western Culture<\/em> Rule No. 118:\u00a0 “No performer in a blues song, rap song or action movie shall say whom <\/em>or isn’t<\/em>.\u00a0 [The preferred forms are who<\/em> and ain’t<\/em>.]\u00a0 Moreover,\u00a0 those who observe Rule No. 118 are considered to have adhered to Western Cultural norms and thus shall not be held in breach of conflicting linguistic rules in this Handbook<\/em>.”<\/p>\n

\u2261\u00a0 Our not-so-local (Saga) “pure oldies” station often plays “Ferry Cross the Mersey<\/a>” by the British band Gerry and the Pacemakers<\/a> and written by the band’s leader Gerry Marsden<\/a>.\u00a0 “Mersey” refers to the River Mersey that divides the cities of Liverpool and Birkenhead<\/a>, Liverpool’s poorer cousin.\u00a0 Since I usually listen to oldies on my portable radio when I do outdoor projects — and since Saga has a rather limited rotation — I have probably heard “Ferry Cross the Mersey” ten times as much in my sixties than I ever did in\u00a0the<\/em> sixties.<\/p>\n

I single out “Ferry Cross the Mersey” because, when I actually listened to the song, I was intrigued by the lyrics:\u00a0 People around every corner \/ They s<\/em>eem to smile and say \/ <\/em>We don’t care what your name is, boy \/ <\/em>We’ll never send you away…<\/em><\/p>\n

Where did this<\/em> come from?\u00a0 The song was about crossing an English river, for godsake!\u00a0 Marsden makes it sound like his ferry transported him to a foreign and hostile land, only to be taken aback when the townfolk of Birkenhead didn’t spit on him and throw him into the stockade.*<\/p>\n

But upon further review, I thought… rivers, walls, trenches, hollers, streets, railroads, Mason-Dixon lines… any boundary at all can serve as a way to separate us from them.\u00a0 Maybe Gerry — and his ferry — were onto something.<\/p>\n

___________<\/h5>\n
* The north side (Liverpool) and the south side (Birkenhead) of the Mersey had been in different counties (Lancashire and Cheshire, respectively) for 783 years when Marsden wrote his song.<\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2261\u00a0 Whenever I ask Alexa, set a timer for 5 minutes (typically when I am grilling burgers), I’m always surprised how quickly those few minutes pass.\u00a0 It’s like, wow, already?\u00a0 I hardly had time to sit down, and now you’re … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thoughts-at-large"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25904"}],"version-history":[{"count":67,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25904\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26534,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25904\/revisions\/26534"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}