On Santa

He is grotesquely overweight. He is childless. He lives in the chilly and undesirable North Pole. He insists on dressing in a bright-red jumpsuit with fur trimmings. He can only ever find employment on one day a year, and, even then, it is night work.

On every accepted level, Santa Claus is a total loser.

Yet this is a man who heads up a brand that commands 98 percent global recognition. Furthermore, he is universally adored.

How does he do it?

In a controlled research investigation involving uninterrupted surveillance videotaping, a sustained loop of twinkly music, and state-of-the-art ­merriness-determination equip­ment, a Dutch santologist named Hans Bunquum discovered the secret to Claus’s phenomenal success.

“The conclusion is both remarkable and inescapable but also—most importantly—counter-intuitive,” Dr. Bunquum told me over a glass of organic lemonade in his stunn­ing waterstulp, or waterside studio, near Rotterdam. “To become the object of universal love, one must first live with a red-nosed rein­deer, and then gain a premier position as the sole registered employer of elves in the Northern Hemisphere. It’s as simple as that.”

(read more parody of Malcom Gladwell here)

Cute Overload

Finn

Thought For The Day

"When asked by a pagan to sum up the whole of Jewish teaching while he stood on one leg, Rabbi Hillel, the older contemporary of Jesus, replied: "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the Torah -- and everything else is only commentary." His Holiness the Dalai Lama put it even more succinctly when he said: "My religion is kindness."


These traditions have also pointed out that it is not sufficient to confine our benevolence to those we find congenial -- to our own ethnic, national or ideological group. We must have what one of the Chinese sages called jian ai, "concern for everybody." If practiced assiduously -- "all day and every day," as Confucius enjoined -- we begin to appreciate our profound interdependence and become fully humane."

--Author and former Roman Catholic nun, Karen Armstrong

In Other News

I'm back at home, and Laura is some hours gone flying back to Denver.  It was nice to see her off at the airport with a smile on her face this time mind you, but now I am faced once again with the apparently insurmountable task of clearing space in the garage for when she eventually returns with a truck bursting to the seams with cats, mountaineering gear, couches, marshmallow mattresses, purple lanterns, and Wonder Woman paraphernalia (not necessarily in that order).  We've got to unload that stuff somewhere, and if I haven't gotten my piles of old couches, futon mattresses, mountaineering gear, kerosene lanterns, and Asterix & Obelix comics (not necessarily in that order) out of the way in time, then it will all go into a heap in my living room where the cats will be regularly scaling it and using the great height to mount aerial assaults.

So really, I should stop watching old episodes of "Battlestar Galactica," and get my ass out there to the garage.  Seriously.

In other news, I crippled* my Facebook account, for real.  One final wall post, all the others deleted, and new posts disabled.  The irony of it is that my final post is that it was "Martian has decided to return to a simpler time of one-on-one, personalized contact."  Like blogging**, for example.  Haha!

*(Why just "cripple," you ask?  Why not just delete it?  Okay, embarrassing admission: I play some Facebook games when nobody is looking.)

**(Seriously, though, I think a blog community is somehow more intimate than the weirdly impersonal amalgam of updates from acquaintances who are years removed.  All the people I want to follow I call or email, or they call or email me -- and there is no audience for our connection.  I guess I just don't play well in groups; the teacher would probably write a stern warning to my parents, were I in primary school today.)

On Nothing, Really

So, we've achieved an acceptable but not yet satisfactory amount of Seattle debauchery, on the one hand because a typical winter storm is working its way through the city, and on the other because Laura is going crazy doing classwork.  So after a day of wandering willy nilly from one apparently random destination to another ("flagship REI? CHECK! bodies exposed exhibit? CHECK! sammiches at the market? CHECK!  caffeination with laptops? CHECK!"), we've finally ended up back at the hotel, she taking an online test, and I sipping a glass of wine whilst gently surfing about random websites and shouting "MONORAIL!" every ten minutes as that ancient contraption rattles past the window, for which I am rewarded with a smile.

Now, I might have words about the willy-nilly nature of our travels today, Seattle being laid out in a something less than rational fashion as it is.  But I won't, because I've been to Washington DC.  And I might complain about my "glass" of wine being a corrogated cup that reads "DO NOT MICROWAVE" up one side and "CAUTION HOT" down the other.  But I won't, because it's got delicious white wine in it, and not McDonald's coffee.  What I will do is provide you with some amusing links.

• Shit My Dad Says 
• Nicole Gastonguay's knitted objects shop 
• The ACME Heart Maker
• A collection of George Carlin Quotes for your amusement
• Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About
  

Really, a fairly poor showing, I know.

UPDATE: Bonus limerick!  Sadly, not mine.

A woman in liquor production
Owns a still of exquisite construction.
The alcohol boils
Through magnetic coils.
She says that it's "proof by induction."

Come Back To Seattle, Wombat, You Know You Miss It

I'm headed south to Seattle for an early start to the weekend tomorrow, primarily to gorge on pho and sushi and  dim sum with Laura, but also to relax and escape what has become an aggressive and unrelenting work schedule*.  And to definitively plan out our master plan for her to move from Denver to B'ham, which we will then put into play on November 23: 19 days away.  Also, she's attending some kind of conference or class or something, and taking a test in Introduction to Statistics, about which I've had a lot of fun helping her to figure out lately.  Embarrassing fun, given that I hold a couple of graduate degrees in a field that uses probability notions every single day and that I could not for the life of me remember how to calculate the critical point of a confidence interval when she called me up to ask about it, but hey, that's what Google is for, right?  Thirty minutes later, ta-da!  I'm a genius.  Seven years of grad school, and what separates me from a first-year stats student is the vague memory of what to type into the search field.  "Oh, I remember now!"

On a completely unrelated note, I went to the YMCA today to work out (as I do every M/W/F) and a dude there was staring at me the entire time.  When he wasn't lifting weights, he'd come sit about six feet away from me and stare at me.  The whole time I was chatting with my workout buddy, and admittedly, our conversation was pretty interesting (glaciers, cervical fractures, swimming with dolphins, generational space travel, local mountain rescue, acupuncture, women, men, turkey with stuffing), but this guy was just a liiiiiiitle too interested. When we moved to a different part of the weight room, he'd move with us.

Sometimes I miss Gold's Gym.  At least there, everyone is just showing off and doesn't give a crap about anyone else in the room.  Well, except the cute girls, of course.  Everyone keeps a discrete eye on the cute girls.

*Yes, you read that correctly.  Show me someplace in the USA North America that has better pho/sushi/dim sum than Seattle.  No fair calling Vancouver, San Fran, or LA, because they're too far away from me.  Well, Vancouver isn't, but an hour waiting out the interminable (and apparently inevitable) secondary border search at the Peace Arch (and in BOTH DIRECTIONS, mind you) is enough to sour me on that town. I ♥ me some Seattle!

On Sandwiches

The nail that stands up must be hammered down.

Japanese saying

I've always liked that particular statement, and for various reasons I've been thinking about it a lot lately.  The metaphor is pretty straightforward: the social order will impose its will upon anyone who dares to be different. But the way it is framed is pretty cool: the nail is standing up: an act of will.  Willfulness.  A choice, made in defiance of the consensus opinion.  And it is not just to be dissuaded, it is to be hammered: suppressed by main force; beaten into place; dealt a body blow with the kind of callousness, indifference, and mass anonymity that only the mob can summon.  And particularly powerful given the context of the culture from whence it came.

Not that I agree with the sentiment, I just think that the framing of the language is beautiful in the way that it evokes such powerful images in my mind.  Things can be dark and yet beautiful.  And personally, I think that the truly damaging darkness comes from conformity and endless comfort, cliques and gossip, and the pressure to be that which we are not.

I have never been comfortable with being a part of something, bigger than me or otherwise.  I would have been an awful army recruit, constantly bucking authority.  I'm vulnerable to reverse psychology because it's not what the mob uses: the mass uses direct force and direct pressure, and so that's what I expect; I'm vulnerable to the wiles of being flanked by intelligence.  And for the same reason (probably), I'm drawn to people who rebel in this way.  Give me a woman who refuses to wear makeup any day of the week.  Any day.

I think I'll go make myself an avocado sammich and ponder its Nowness.