Driven to Distraction (i.e., Distinction)

Holy mother of mackerels!

I tried this interactive texting-while-driving video game at The New York Times website and almost jumped out my second-floor window it was so frustrating:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/07/19/technology/20090719-driving-game.html?hp

I don't know if the game will work for you if you're not registered with nytimes.com (easy to do), but let me tell you. It's great to be old. Meaning: texting and driving is not on my radar screen, or in my toolkit, or part of my skill set. Not anytime soon.

Yikes!

Kinesthetic Melody

Ran across this term in a story in the NY Times, about a woman who used to get seizures, never got them while running, but through a brain operation loses track of place and time. Her neuropsychologist says she runs according to a

kinesthetic melody.

I like that.

Good name for a band.

Or a religion, or afterlife, or this life, or intuitiveness, or synchronicity in work or play, or harmony (not the dot com one), or art, or music, et cetera, ad infinitum.

"Age quod agis," as Father Birge so wisely intoned when we were seminarians (and we hooted and hollered until he closed the door to our classroom). Little did we know.

I added "kinesthetic melody" to my list at Wordie.org.

one-sentence meditation upon a sympathy card

Commissioned by my wife to buy a sympathy card for her sister-in-law's father, someone I had never met (well, not for him; he's dead; a card for my spouse's sister-in-law and her family), I ambled into the Hallmark Gold Crown store (sure, I did in fact recently join the retailer's crown rewards [trademark but not i-capped on the thingy I got in the mail] program) at Carousel Center mall, destined to be Destiny USA, or Arendi, or more precisely likely predestined to be a cavernous echo of the last of our swollen appetites (appetites are so pre-recession), I browsed the variegated racks of offerings as displayed by signs, like highway markers or exit announcements (after all, an exit is what made me enter this retail outlet): Retirement, New Home, Get Well, New Job, Birthday, Thinking of You, Encouragement, and realized, albeit whimsically if not flippantly (and shared as much with the mother and daughter or mother and sister near me, garnering a nervous chuckle), that all such markers are but synonyms for Sympathy, conceding that our Buddhist friends are right in saying that all things are connected.

Facebook Security Word Poetry, an addendum

All right.

I'm a Facebook newbie.

These security "passwords" are common for many sites, including here.

In Facebook it says:

"Enter both words below, separated by a space."

Has the definition of words been so broadened as to include any combination of letters, letters and numbers, and so on -- in a quasi-English syntactical fashion?

Or are all these "words" in the latest O.E.D. Supplement?

Facebook Security Word Poetry

condon hirth

roth 20

kookje Ali5

medan fourth

scofield netted

5 pxp sanely

since stiller

vagabond 39-77

urban haiku IV

whispering grass grows/wind rustling backyard maple/green leaf falls, fallen

New Year's Resolutions, 2010

Why wait till 2010?

Let's do a dry run now; see what works; or doesn't.

I hope this starts a movement. What would we call it? The Pre-New Year's Post-Last Year's Quasi-Resolute Resolutions?

1. Run the Bhutan Marathon 2010.

2. Do the dishes every day. Maybe every other day.

3. Give up cigarettes. (Wait. I'd have to start!)

4. Meditate. Especially if someone is yelling at me; go into a deep trance.

5. Eat haiku.

6. Chew.

7. Walk.

8. Skip, at least once.

9. Write.

10. Sleep. (Perchance to dream.)

11. Nap.

12. Revise.

I need to revise my list.

But, as I said, I've got time to work on it.

Put back on your head those too-small, colorful cardboard cone hats and resume twirling your little noisemakers.

Cheers.

Happy 2010!

(Just practicing.)

(What would Kierkegaard say?)

Those New Year's Resolutions

Now that we are reaching the halfway point of 2009's long march into 2010 (and I hope by 2010 people start saying, "Twenty ten" instead of "Two thousand ten" because, after all, if you remember back to the ol' 20th century, we didn't typically say "Nineteen hundred and ninety-nine"; we said "Nineteen ninety-nine." And rarely did we ever say, "One thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine," except on occasions requiring pomp and exaggerated formality), how are those new year's resolutions coming along?

I didn't make any new year's resolutions.

Did you?

Just asking.

Bar Codes

Speaking of bar codes, here are some to ponder:

• It is not cool to say in a bar, "Right now, I find you attractive, but what happens when I sober up?"
• Ever notice that when people relate morning-after horror stories of alcohol-based liaisons, no one ever admits to being the less-attractive one (to put it politely) on the other side of the bed?
• Bar codes dictate certain modes of behavior: loudness, repetition, false originality, flights of fancy, belligerence, pseudo-romance, and loudness. And repetition.
  
• It is utterly uncouth to spill a drink onto someone's lap as a means of introduction and a cheap way to sample mutual responses to physical contact.

Bar none? Mais, non! Bar all.

You may've missed this, but the bar code turned 35 on June 26.

Yup.

I gleaned some cool facts about the bar code from The New York Times:

-- it has 30 black and 29 white bars (how poetic, minimalist, and elegant: who ever thinks of the white bars? Hunh? You just thought the white parts were blank spaces, didn't you? I did.)

-- George J. Laurer, an I.B.M. engineer, led the team that developed the bar code (Laurer, now 84, praises its three great qualities: cheap, needed, and reliable.)

-- It was first used for a 10-pack of Juicy Fruit gum (67 cents)

-- Bar codes are scanned about 10 billion (with a B) times a day.

-- A committee of reviewers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recommended only one change to the initial design: change the font of the numbers below the bar code.

-- Neither I.B.M. nor its developers patented the bar code. GS 1, a nonprofit, gets a minimal annual fee from manufacturers to cover costs of overseeing the bar code's international standards.

-- UPC stands for Universal Product Code.

-- Bar codes cost a half-cent each.

The New York Times breaks down each component of the UPC is a very informative graphic.

The bar code pictured above is from the front page of The New York Times.