Yesterday I Learned … VII

March 29, 2020November 29, 2023 RilalyLeave a comment

Yesterday I learned that some of us still don’t know how to perform drive-thru transactions properly. Some say the first drive-thru restaurant to open a side window happened in 1928, some say 1947, but whatever the case is, they’re been around for as long as most of us have been alive. Thus, those of us who didn’t grow up in a subculture that avoids technology know how to perform a drive-thru transaction. Yet, we read a decades-old menu of a decades old franchise as if it requires a Rosetta Stone to decipher its hieroglyphs. When we finally decide what we want, we search for the button to ignite the speaker device. For those who don’t know, restaurants in the 1970’s had buttons customers were required to use when they were ready to speak. When the time to perform arrives, we scream into the speaker as if we don’t understand the mechanizations behind the audio amplification a speaker can provide. What should take two minutes, often takes ten. Today, I realized that those of us who fall prey to the confusion this transaction provides are officially as old as the people they used to mock for being old.

Yesterday I realized that most artists spend most of their time skimming the core. Think about your favorite artists in any milieu. How many earth-shattering pieces did they create? The best artists, be they in literature, music, painting, etc., are extremely fortunate to develop four unique pieces that stand alone and above their peers’ creations. How many pieces did da Vinci create? Two? We have under twenty definitively proven da Vinci works, and only two are known throughout the world. How many pieces did Van Gogh, Picasso, James Joyce, and Andy Kaufman create? Some artists limited themselves to a few creations, and they spent most of their time perfecting those pieces, but others created hundreds of pieces, but most of them were not great, as we’re defining great here. Those of us who love music, fall in love with certain artists. How many great, epic, I-can’t-wait-to-listen-to-them-again albums did these artists create? I’m not limiting this discussion to sales figures here either. I’m talking about you-know-greatness-when-you-hear-it great. Three examples from my youth are King’s X Gretchen Goes to Nebraska, Queensyche’s Operation Mindcrime, and Metallica’s Master of Puppets. I was so in love with each of these albums that it didn’t matter how great their next album was, I was going to greet it as a normal person might greet their child into the world. I would listen to these new albums thirty times, before I began skipping through some songs, until I eventually tossed them into my personal dustbin. Each of these artists followed up what were for me magical, transcendent albums with admirable efforts, but the albums top-to-bottom didn’t have the same magic as their predecessors. The subsequent albums had some great singles, but the artists seemed to skim the core of their greatness for the rest of their careers. Now that we’ve achieved some distance, we can reflect back and evaluate our favorite artists more objectively. I think most music aficionados will now admit that their favorite artists probably had two albums that stand the test of time in them. Yet, it’s so exciting to see an artist come so close to their core that we buy their entire catalog without hearing any of the songs or reading critical reviews. Today, I realized that I love a great book, and I enjoy the occasional painting or two, but I never understood how someone could stare at a great painting for a half hour. There is something different about music, however, something that reached me when I was far too young to understand the connection, and something that, to quote the cliché, soothed my soul. Music is the universal art form that brings us together and drives us apart. I gave three examples of albums that inspired me in ways no other art form could, but I could probably list 100 off the top of my head that ‘set the sick ones free’. That list of 100 albums is so personal to me, but could it have been a time and place matter, or is a great album always a great album no matter when they come out, and how difficult are they to follow up?

“I’ve got no imagination. I never dream. My so-called inventions already existed in the environment—I took them out. I’ve created nothing. Nobody does. There’s no such thing as an idea being brain-born. Everything comes from the outside. The industrious one coaxes it from the environment.” –Thomas Edison

Does art reflect life, or does life reflect art? How many of the most brilliant pieces of art are nothing more than interpretations of the world around the artist? Isn’t that the definition of art? Aren’t all artistic pieces “brain-born”? I understand that Edison was trying to be humble, but it doesn’t make much sense, if you consider Edison artistic in a universal sense. Artistic pieces are born through a complicated algorithm that arrow through influences, experiences, and individual interpretations. Whether it involves the creation of the lightbulb, the novel, and every other form of art, most of the artistic minutiae of a creation occur in the individual interpretation stage, but most artists could not arrive at that place without the first two.

Yesterday I considered most psychological tests a total waste of time. I don’t put much value in Rorschach tests, I don’t know what the spiral eye test does for anyone, other than being a little neat, and I think fill in the blank tests, insert letters into this b_ _t, are pointless. They’re all neat and fun, and they seem to say something fun and interesting about us, but what does it say about us if we answer boat? Today, I found an interesting nugget from Malcolm Gladwell’s book Talking to Strangers suggests that suggests I might be wrong that they are a complete waste of time. In one test, the examiners gave this fill in the blank test to a group A. They then gave the results of that test to group B, to have them help the examiners decipher the answers. Group B psychoanalyzed the answers. Unbeknownst to both groups, the examiners created the test for group B, with the theory that we say more about ourselves when we analyze others than we ever do when we analyze ourselves. I still don’t know if they’re valuable tests to determine our characteristics, but this little twist suggests they’re not a complete waste of time.

Yesterday, I wondered if others might consider what I was writing funny and interesting. We all have people in mind when we write. Today, I realized that that is an utter waste of time. You do what you do, work your tail off, and the accolades might follow. The ‘you do what you do’ principle does not work, however, if you don’t know the rules. As most comedians know, this is always funnier than that. The ‘this’ in this equation is rhythm. Most of the time one needs to economize. Brevity is the soul of wit, and all that, but one can get away with extended punch lines if they’re gifted. There are those especially gifted few who can upend and redefine the rules, but if we enjoyed betting, we would probably say that you and your gimmick are not for long.

Yesterday, I realized I’m probably as far from a ‘betting man’ as one can get. Anytime we hear analysts address a situation, they say, “If I were a betting man …” When I watch game shows, and the contestant is allowed to double their money by answering a final question, I don’t understand how anyone could take that bet. “You mean to tell me that you survived the three strikes and you’re out portion of the game with ‘X’ amount of money, and you risked it on the double or nothing final question?” Today, I realized that I would be that guy who disappoints the audience at home by taking the money and running so far away that I might not think about the chance I didn’t take. I might think of my refusal to take a chance every once in a while, but even if I took that chance and answered the question correctly, I wouldn’t feel so much gratification by answering the final question correctly that it would be worth it. It would pale in comparison to the face slapping nights I would endure if I missed that final question.

Defeating the Aliens

March 28, 2020March 31, 2020 RilalyLeave a comment

“The aliens are not evil, but they are here to eat us,” our main character replies to the first question the talk show host asks him. This contradiction draws some laughter from the studio audience, as they don’t understand the difference. “Do we consider the lion evil? Of course we don’t. When lions eat cute, baby antelopes, they don’t do it to satisfy some perverse love of violence. Anyone who thinks lions are evil is assigning their thought process to the primal actions of the lion, or they might watch too many cartoons. I agree with those who say that the aliens are not evil in the same vein, and I disagree with my colleagues on this note, but I can only guess that the lion’s prey don’t care what their intent is. We know the only reason lions kill is that they’re hungry. I think the aliens who landed on our shoes are desperately hungry, and they know we have meat on our bones. They just want to eat it. If you consider that evil, that’s up to you, but my bet is that the baby antelope doesn’t suffer their fate without, at some point, mischaracterizing the lion’s motive.”

The reactions the various players have to the main character’s appearance on the talk show ends up saying more about them than it does the main character, or the aliens. When the scientists and reporters attempt to interact with the aliens, soon after the shock and awe of their arrival subsides, they do so to understand why they’re here. They want to befriend them, and we follow their lead on the matter, because we want learn everything we can about them, so we can learn from them.

The aliens know their arrival is the greatest thing that has ever happened to us, and they know how much it excites us. They operate in good faith, in the beginning, and they focus on public relations to build trust with us to hide their real motives. When one of the reporters, assigned to cover the aliens, disappears, the aliens’ approval ratings suffers a dive. The public begins to suspect that the main character might be right when he suggested that the aliens captured her, filleted her and refrigerated her to take her meat back to their home planet.

“They had their eyes on that reporter,” the main character suggests, “because she had right combination of muscle and fat. My friends and I have studied all of the people who have gone missing since their arrival, and we’ve found no discernible patterns, other than they’re not too fat or too muscular. We think the aliens are eating those of us of a certain body mass index that contains a quality mix of fat and muscle. We think there are so many humans on earth that they’ve developed a finicky preference. They prefer those of us with a little fat to add flavor to our meat, in the manner a little fat flavors a ribeye steak.

“Their initial landing was awe-inspiring,” our main character says on another talk show, “and I was as affected as anyone else by their initial messages, and their attempts to help us advance our science, but the number of missing people that followed alarmed me so much that I began studying them. It’s them, I’m telling you, they’re the reason we now have so many missing people. They’re filleting them, and refrigerating them to feed the starving population on their home planet. I don’t know why it’s so hard for us to accept this idea. Our water supplies have not diminished, nor any of our other natural resources, and I don’t think they’re here to build friendly relations between the planets, as they suggest. There’s no evidence to suggest that they’re here to breed with us, or any of the other things we’ve guessed aliens might want over the decades. So, what’s their motive? I don’t care what their public relations team says, we should still ask why they came here in the first place? We’ve heard them say they had the technology to come here decades ago, so why now? Why are they here? I think they regard us as food, and I’ve been trying to get that message out before it’s too late. As we sort through all these complex arguments regarding their intentions and motives, we forget Occam’s Razor, “All other things being equal, we may assume the superiority of the demonstration that derives from fewer hypotheses.” Simply put, the best answer is often the simplest.”

Most moviemakers line “alien attack” movies with hints of the adversary’s high-minded intelligence. The aliens, in these productions, are required to be of an intelligence we cannot comprehend, and they are of unfathomable strength and power. Our production would state that evidence suggests that power and strength usually counter balance one another in most beings. Is the lion smarter than the human is? No, but that wouldn’t matter in a one on one conflict. Is the body builder smarter than the average person is? Most are not, because we all focus on one pursuit to the usual detriment of the other characteristic. Thus, the alien cannot be of superior, unfathomable intellect and superior strength and power. Not only is it a violation of what I consider the natural order of things, it’s not very interesting.

Yet, even productions that try to have it both ways, be they sci-fi novels, movies, or otherwise eventually begin to train their focus on one of these attributes. If they depict the aliens as the literary equivalent to the bloodthirsty lion is this nothing more than a slasher flick? If they focus on the superior intellect, do they do so to achieve a level of complication that might lead to more favorable critical reviews? Whatever the case is, we now require our moviemakers to provide subtle hints of alien intelligence. The more subtle the better, as that makes it creepier. The moviemaker, as with any storyteller, might be feeding us the entertainment we want, but I don’t think so.

I think the quality moviemaker modifies his material in such a way that it provides subtle hints of the surprising and unusual intelligence of the aliens. They spool out hints of the aliens’ intelligence in drips to further horrify and mystify us. They do this to mess with our mind in a way that a slasher flick doesn’t bother doing. They want to creep us out and scare us somewhere deep in our psychology.

In our production, the aliens have developed powers that we cannot comprehend, but as with any decades-long reliance on a power, it comes at a cost. To explain this theory, the main character says, “Imagine if we could emit super gamma rays from our eyes, in the manner these aliens do. It would be a superpower to be sure, but it might lead us to neglect the intelligence we might otherwise employ in tactical and militaristic conflict. We might rely on those powers so much that it could result in a deficit of our intellect. I submit that even though these aliens employ some war-like tactics, they’re as intelligent as a lion and not as smart as we are. I think we can defeat them with our intelligence.”

Every alien/monster movie eventually also eventually turns into an allegory about our inability to accept outsiders. In our production, the aliens would use our compassionate approach to outsiders against us. They are intelligent enough to put together a seductive war-like plan, and in doing so, they purport to support a cause that most humans adore. They don’t have a cause, but they know that we’ll follow them to our own demise if they cater to our heart correctly.

The reporters and scientists in every alien/monster movie are always correct in the designs they create for how we should approach and handle our relations with aliens. What would happen if they operated from a faulty premise? Everyone who employs the scientific method to resolve a crisis, approaches the situation with a question, does background research and eventually reaches a hypothesis. At what point in the attempts to prove or disprove that hypothesis, do we troubleshoot and find out if we approached the issue from a subjective or biased view? At what point, do we arrow back to the beginning on our algorithm and correct the question that led us to an incorrect conclusion?

In our production, the reporters and scientists are operating from a flawed premise they develop as a result of their own biases and subjective viewpoints. The aliens enjoy that premise and begin building upon that narrative to sell it to all earthlings. These useful idiots inadvertently aid the aliens’ public relations campaign to soften us up. They discover, too late, that the less worldly main character’s simple truth that while the aliens are not as evil as their detractors suggest, they’re also not hyper-intelligent as the reporters and scientists theorized. The idea that they just want to eat us bears out, and we realize that if we all agreed to these facts earlier, we could’ve saved a lot more people. We all had a difficult time agreeing to the idea that we were of superior intellect, but once we did, we used it to defeat them. We used our intellect to nullify their superior force. We were elated with the victory, of course, but once life returned to normal, there was that sinking feeling that if we just ignored the reporters, the scientists, and all of the people who believed we should be more accepting of the aliens sooner, we probably wouldn’t have been victims of the worldwide slaughter that ensued. If we listened to the main character, and all of the people who supported his view, and we followed his simple strategy for attack, we could’ve saved a lot more lives.

Yesterday I Learned … VI

March 22, 2020November 29, 2023 RilalyLeave a comment

Yesterday, I heard a joke that suggested if we were to accept that the now decades old television show 24 as a realistic depiction of 24 hours of Jack Bauer’s life, we were going to need to see him go to the bathroom every once in a while. Everyone has to use the facilities every once in a while, this joke implied, and if we were going to accept the fact that Jack Bauer was truly human, the writers should’ve included a line like, “I know lives are on the line, Mr. President, and I’m well aware of the fact that every precious second counts, but I have to take a squirt.” The joke is funny, because it has an element of truth to it. We don’t need to know that Jack Bauer does this, of course, but if the show’s directors and writers seek a version of true reality, shouldn’t we see him relieve himself in some way?

It’s here now. Enterprising young directors heard that call, and they responded. Whatever remained of that artistic abstract, known as the fourth wall, is now coming down. These young and ambitious directors now force their actors to engage in the ultimate form of reality by relieving themselves on camera to indulge our desire for this ultimate form of reality.

Today, I realized that if a director asked me, twenty years ago, how far they should go to depict reality, I might have told them I’m all for injecting a sense of reality in various entertainment vehicles, and I might have encouraged them to pop whatever bubble they could find. I would’ve kept that advice general, of course, as I don’t know what I’m talking about when it comes to making visual productions, and I don’t know how to depict reality on screen. If that director then asked me what I thought an audience might think of seeing their favorite character squat on a commode, I would’ve told them that that’s probably a step too far. If they asked me if I thought hearing a character’s water hit the water might help audiences relate to their character better, I would’ve said, “No, I think most people accept the fact that the characters these actors are portraying are human, and while there are some elements you can introduce to provide some hyper reality on a cases by case basis, the idea that one uses the facilities is better left assumed. I also don’t think seeing or hearing bodily functions, adds to that sense of association or cements that bond any further.” It turns out some modern directors decided that I was wrong. When they depict a character vomit now, it’s not enough for them to provide the audio of the act or show the convulsions a body goes through in the act of vomiting. In the king of the mountain mentality of depicting reality, these directors decided that we need to see the chunks and fluid flow from the mouth. We can only guess that these ambitious directors heard the 24 joke, and they decided to heed the call that we need to see bodily functions if we are going to accept it as real. We’re not at the point, yet, where we demand to see waste move out of the body before we accept the fact it’s truly happening, but recent evidence suggests we’re probably not too far away.

Go to Your Room

Yesterday, I heard a great joke from Jerry Seinfeld. “The penal system we have is so American. ‘You do something bad, you go to a room. You think about what you did,’” Jerry Seinfeld said mocking the convention of our country’s archaic idea of imprisoning criminals. I don’t think I need to qualify my reply to Jerry Seinfeld by saying I think he’s a comedic genius. If the reader thinks I do, let me just say that I think there are but a handful of comedians who can put a clever spin on the conventions of daily life, or our societal conventions, on a level anywhere close to Jerry Seinfeld. How many comedians could take a large societal issue like the philosophy behind incarceration and associate it with the punishments our parents inflicted on us when we were naughty as kids?

Today, I thought about how much his clever and hilarious point misses the mark. Before I write anything further, let me also write that I understand that his comments are satirical in nature, and that satirists should not be required to debate their jokes or provide solutions. The first, obvious rebuttal I would make is that the idea of crime and punishment is not exclusive to America. Other countries, throughout the world in history, tried imprisoning those who committed transgressions against their fellow man, and that historical precedent worked so well that America adopted it. The second question I would pose to Seinfeld is, “If you were king for a day, how would you handle this whole idea of people committing crimes? And before you answer, remember that there are victims of crime, and there would be subsequent victims that could be harmed by your edicts.” The third, and related, point I would make is that lawmakers decide laws and appropriate punishments to provide cultural definition. We know we live in a ‘You do this, you go there for a certain amount of time relative to the crime and the nature of the crime.’ In a Representative Republic, we select lawmakers and judges to decide those laws and the subsequent punishments, and if we don’t like them, we vote them out of office and select another representative we believe better represents our views. Again, I know Jerry Seinfeld is a satirist who pokes fun at conventions, and this joke involves some healthy, insightful commentary on a situation that plagues our country, but I’d love to know how he might better fix what he calls our flawed system of punishment.

It’s Not about You

Yesterday, I borrowed a book from the library on the former Nirvana singer/guitarist Kurt Cobain, and his influence on music and society. About twenty pages in, I realized that this author was personalizing his narrative under the ‘Where was I when I first heard?’ theme. “I couldn’t believe it,” he wrote. “I was so shocked. We couldn’t believe it. I called friends I haven’t talked to in years, and we consoled one another.” Who cares, was my first thought, and I couldn’t shake that thought no matter how much further I read. I didn’t care about this author’s reaction any more than he would mine.

I learned a valuable lesson, twenty pages in, if an author is going to write about someone or something we all know, their first job is to tell us something we don’t know. If an author is going to make it about the author to illustrate a point, that’s fine, as long as they employ the ‘get in, get out’ methodology to achieve a greater point. At some point in his long-winded narrative, the author made it obvious that his book was more about him than his subject. As far as I’m concerned, there is no fine line here. In this case, the author described his reaction to Cobain’s suicide to be part of the moment. I don’t care what the subject is, whether it’s fiction or non, I read with an ‘I don’t care what the author thinks’ mentality. A gifted storyteller might tell us what they think, but they should do so in a carefully structured method that leads us to think we thought it first.

As a reader, my advice to all authors is, don’t write about you until people care about what you think. Even then, the reason we might care about you is that you’re such a gifted writer that we never know it’s you telling us what you think. Today, I realized how difficult this is in the Twitter age. We make posts about our friends, our feelings about our friends, our feelings about our feelings, and the fact that we’re now at Arby’s. People tell us that they enjoy our posts, and we morph this into creative ways of telling everyone how everything is about us in one way or another. We continue doing so, until we are unable to make the separation necessary to write about our subject without including our feelings on the subject. Some suggest that it’s impossible to be objective, but there’s subjectivity and then there’s subjectivity. Some authors obviously think that when they begin writing about their feelings on a subject that their readers will appreciate their ability to be vulnerable on paper and that they will value their unflinching and refreshing honesty on the subject they’re addressing, and we might, if we cared about the author. If we cared about the author, we would’ve knowingly purchased their autobiography, their memoirs, or some catalog of their musings. If the author decides, instead, to write about someone that someone else might be interested in reading about, the author needs to remember that we purchased the book, because we thought it was about them, and no one is ever going to purchase a book about you, because not everything is about you.

The Media and the Coronavirus

Yesterday, I believed in a couple crackpot, Chicken Little conspiracy theories and some depressing doomsayer stories. I didn’t believe a majority of them, but I believed enough of them to recognize these theories for what they are. It took some embarrassment to reach that point. “You don’t really believe that do you?” friends and family would ask when I would repeat their drivel. It also took the humiliation of being wrong more often than I was right to help shape and form my beliefs system, but as I said in another post on this topic, I was eventually able to shed that skin.

We believe these theories because we’re afraid, and fear can be a good thing when we use it properly, as it can lead to self-preservation. A fear of heights, for example, can prevent us from going so high that we could get hurt. Some fears are irrational, such as a fear of alien attacks, sharks, and ghosts, but the brain uses fear to protect itself and the body. The 24-7 news outlets, and other companies that send out email blasts, also learned how to manipulate fear to get us to do what they want us to do, mainly tune in. They played on our fears to get ratings and clicks, and they did it so often that we were numb to it when they begin reporting on what we should fear for our own self-preservation.

How much of our time and fear did these networks and email blasters waste over the years on frivolous matters that would blow over by the end of the week? How many “News Bulletins” followed by exclamation points did they waste on stupid stories that had no relevance? How many people were afraid to invest their hard-earned dollars in the stock market? “Just wait,” rational minds advised, “this whole thing will blow over by Wednesday,” and so many of these Chicken Little conspiracy theories and some depressing doomsayer stories did. The market rewarded diligent investors, who ignored these stories, for their patience.

The job of various news outlets is to report on matters that require our attention. When they report on natural disasters, for example, we tune into their broadcasts for information on how to act and react. They know when we tune in, as do their advertisers, and the two of them join forces to develop, or enhance, subsequent stories to demand our attention. As any artist will tell you, a novice can enhance relatively meager paintings with shading and artistic framing. The 24-7 news networks often enhanced such relatively meager stories in this manner, until we begin believing every story is a national tragedy, and then we experienced burn out.

I don’t know what difference it would’ve made, but I think we might have taken the coronavirus more seriously if they didn’t break us down with every over-hyped hurricane or political story that was going to end our country, as we know it. I also have a special place in the dark parts of my heart for the financial doomsayers who, for years, predicted the market would fall for whatever reason they dreamed up to get us to click on their emails.

Today, I realized that the coronavirus is a full-fledged pandemic, and it took a lot of convincing to break through the thick, hard shell I developed to all of these Chicken Little, crackpot theories and depressing doomsayer stories. I don’t know about anyone else, but I had a threshold. By the time the coronavirus broke, some of my instincts told me that this might be different, but after being inundated by so many disaster stories that required my attention for so many years, I thought it would all blow over without too much pain. So, I direct some portion of the blame of my financial pain on all those crackpot, Chicken Little conspiracy theorist and depressing doomsayers who exaggerated every story to the point that they scared me. Over time, I found that the best course of action was to do nothing and to recognize conspiracy theories and doomsayers for what they are. If I believed one-tenth of them over the decades, there’s no way I would have invested my relatively meager savings into the stock market. I wouldn’t believe in America, and I probably wouldn’t have left my home. I didn’t believe the coronavirus was as bad as they were saying. I thought it was more 24-7 news bulletins on a story that would blow over like an over-hyped hurricane, and I now blame them for it.