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Embrace It!
ByHeatherI love it when I meet people who understand winter, as in the only way to thrive during winter is to take it head on, get out in it. Dress warm and get outside. If you are cold, dress warmer, get moving.
— Jeff Smith, editor, Traverse, Northern Michigan’s Magazine
I’m a northern girl. I was born and raised in an environment whose seasons were punctuated by the first frost and the spring thaw … and the highlight of the year was the day the ice broke on the river.
The secret to happiness in these “harsh” environments is to meet them head on. Dress warm and get outside. Do not let the weather control your emotions or your happiness. If you are cold, dress warmer, get moving.
But isn’t life itself a harsh environment? Life is hard. The secret to happiness is the same. Embrace it. Meet it head on. Get out in it. Dress warm. If you are cold, dress warmer, get moving.
Consumers Go On Strike
ByHeatherAs the economy continues to sour, consumers have gone on strike. For the past few months, I have been contemplating the following economic and social trends that seem to explain why.
- American productivity has risen almost 20% in the last decade (Source)
- Real median income over the same period has declined (Source)
- Executive compensation has risen astronomically (Source)
- Consumer debt has risen substantially (Source)
- Consumer spending comprises 70% of GDP
Rising productivity is what enables companies to increase employee’s pay. Increases in pay result in the overall rise in our standard of living. However, in the last decade, this relationship between productivity and rising employee pay seems to have been fractured.
Trees
ByHeatherAny fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed, chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones. Few that fell trees plant them; nor would planting avail much towards getting back anything like the noble primeval forests. During a man’s life only saplings can be grown, in the place of old trees – tens of centuries old – that have been destroyed.
Like many in my generation, I devoured J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings with great relish. The metaphors, archetypes and stories from the rich world of Middle Earth continue to resonate through my mind many years after my last reading. One of my favorite creations is the sentient, intelligent, and wise race of Ents. These humanoid trees spoke too slowly and at a frequency too low for humans to perceive. They moved through the forest at a pace too slow to be perceptible.
Some years ago I hiked with a friend to a sacred Native American burial ground in the mountains of Northwest New Mexico…
M*A*S*H
ByHeatherKnow this. You can cut me off from the civilized world. You can incarcerate me with two moronic cellmates. You can torture me with your thrice-daily swill. But you cannot break the spirit of a Winchester. My voice shall be heard from this wilderness, and I shall be delivered from this fetid and festering sewer.
I became a giant fan of M*A*S*H during my undergraduate years in college. By the time I tuned in the show had been on the air for many seasons and had found its stride. Each night the dorm lounge would fill up with fans as we all partook of the syndicated re-runs punctuated once a week with a fresh fix. The writing was superb, the acting a joy to watch. The storylines were moving and yet funny. It seems like every character was my favorite. I have seen each episode so many times I can recite the entire plot line within seconds of seeing the opening sequence.
The quote above from Charles Emerson Winchester is one of my favorites. …
TV Ads – Too Many?
ByHeatherWe are in the business of providing the material that prevents the commercials from all slamming together . . . that’s what we are doing here. That’s what we are doing on the West Wing set. We gotta deliver them twelve minutes of stuff to separate the Chevy commercials.
— Lawrence O’Donnell, Jr. Executive Producer of the The West Wing. Quoted in an NPR interview, January 2006.
I counted forty-two ads in last week’s episode of Lost. And that does not include any that aired before the show started or after the credits started to roll. Just forty-two ads in five breaks squeezed between six seven-minute segments of content. There were almost nineteen minutes of ads in a sixty-two minute time slot. That’s almost 30% of the air time dedicated to noise from advertisers.
The Illusion of Knowledge
ByHeatherThe greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents and the ocean was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.
— Daniel Boorstin
To really appreciate the profundity of this quote you have to think back to Galileo (1564 – 1642) and his epic battle with the Roman Catholic church over the nature of our solar system. Although Copernicus (1473 – 1543) had developed the heliocentric theory a hundred years earlier, the “prevailing wisdom” maintained that the earth was at rest at the center of the universe while the sun and the planets revolved around it.
But Galileo had a telescope — and became convinced that Copernicus was right. He championed the sun-centric “theory” at great personal risk. He was declared a heretic, forced to recant, and spent the last years of his life under house arrest. The church did not lift its ban on the general prohibition against works advocating heliocentrism until 1758.