Tsunami Inu

津波犬   Tsunami inu, tsunami dog (lit. "harbor wave dog")

"There is another dog right next to the one sitting down. He is not moving. I wonder.... I wonder if he is alright. The dog is protecting him. Yes. He is protecting the dog. That is why he did not want us to approach them. He was trying to keep us at bay. I can't watch this. This is very difficult to watch. Oh. Look. He is moving. He is alive."

After the video was shot, the dogs were both taken into care of the local animal shelter.

Vietnamese Dog Tree

I dreamed that Vietnamese people tied tiny toy dogs, or puppies, to the branches of small ash trees. They considered them to be holiday decorations, much like Christmas tree trimmings. But the little dogs kept slipping off the branches and had to scramble back up on their unnatural perches, lest they hang. The Vietnamese thought this was cute, but I felt very badly for the dogs. It felt similar to the tenuous struggle of my present financial and career situation.

Don't Grow Old Quietly

The Dead Weather...

...and the most politically incorrect video of all time, which serves as an adequate metaphor for romance.



Of course, I wouldn't want my little girl to watch this, because, you know, cigarettes are bad for you (viz. 3:17).

Guns are yummy

Cigarettes are bad

Catastrophe Theory

Every so often, a metaphor supremely descriptive of the current Zeitgeist unexpectedly bubbles up from divers sources all at once. The current one is the concept of the tipping point, popularized by a book of that title published in 2000 by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell defined a tipping point as "the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point."

Conservative commentators such as Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly have applied the metaphor to the recent 2010 elections. A cogent article by James Gannon summarized this idea nicely in The American Spectator. It is probably only a matter of time before it is applied as well to the unexpectedly nascent Tunisian and Egyptian popular uprisings.

There might be a larger scope to the concept, though. I've been giving a lot of thought to the broad sweep of change that has occurred in our society in the past few years. While not as sever as the Great Depression, we call it the Great Recession--but it is no more limited to economic machinations, as it is limited to the vagaries of political football.

I confess I haven't gotten my head around it yet. I can only speak to my poor singleton's perception of it. A few surrealistic motifs of my youth come to mind. The rapid, precipitous changes in social economic and political structures I call the Wave of Mutilation.

As to causes and mechanics of the tectonic changes we've seen, I can't help going back to a memory from graduate school, when in the engineering library I found a curiously titled book: Catastrophe Theory. In short, this is the study of how built structures fail. The most interesting thing I discovered about such failures is that almost always, the integrity of the structure holds within normal variances until stress brings it to a catastrophic and irreversible failure point.

In other words, things look peachy until they suddenly go pear-shaped.

To Hell with New Year's Resolutions

Several years ago I replaced the idea of "resolutions" with "principles." So rather than saying I have this or that goal, which is often thwarted, and at the end of the year I feel even more worthless than the previous year, I generally commit to changing my daily or weekly habits and attitudes according to key guiding priciples, and then evaluate my progress at the end of the year. To Hell with New Year's resolutions, I say!

Now, this is not to say that goals aren't useful--but only if you break them down into discrete tasks and focus on executing the plan. This is because plans "gang aft aglay." In other words, I tend to measure success by performance on the whole process--how adaptive and resourceful was I?

Here were the guiding principles I set for 2010:

• Stop following paths to nowhere and behaviors that don't meet your needs. For example, work toward getting a job in a new career path, whatever it may be, though it may be tempting to take a nice gig that you're comfortable with.
• Identify essential or blocking tasks and follow through on each until done.
• Focus on real experiences toward real goals in the real world.
  I've cut way down on TV viewing. I've set limits on time online, and replaced it with more book reading and writing ON PAPER. Usually the low-tech approach is more rooted in the real world. Recently I've decided not walk around plugged into my MP3 player--it renders you essentially deaf, and puts you in what self-defense experts term "condition white," a lack of awareness that renders you vulnerable to accidents or assault.

So, what are my new priciples for 2011? In addition to the above, which are ongoing, I'm working toward these:

• Plan weekly, prepare daily.
• Learn how to think and act entrepreneurially; don't think like a consumer. That is, the mindset with which we're unremittingly programmed, that buying stuff will solve all our problems and make us feel better about ourselves.
• With respect to writing projects, act rather than plan.

That last item merits some discussion. Blogging over the past two years has been much more rewarding than I expected. It has given me a chance to experiment with my ideas, and how to form content as well as the medium (design and images). Why does it work? For one thing, it's a low pressure situation--you write only little at a time--and over time you learn what works and what doesn't. It teaches another valuable lesson that you can take to other ventures--what I call the Amazon approach vs the Microsoft approach.

In the old days, software companies developed a product and tested it iteratively until they were reasonably certain that it worked. After remaining bugs were documented as "features," it was copied onto media such as floppy disk, or later, CD-ROM. This gave rise to phrases such as "burning the golden bits onto disk" as if the disk were some sacred calendar chiseled in stone.

But Microsoft still uses this model for products distrbuted via the Web. If the product or service isn't perfect, the entire process has to be re-evaluated until they can work out the problems, and usually several features are cut in order to make the deadline. Any improvements that developers come up with during this cycle must be pushed off until the next release. In other words, the product can only be as good as the original plan, which often goes back a few years. An apropos marketing slogan might be "Here's last year's technology today."

By comparison, if Amazon puts a widget on their website, and the widget isn't popular, or doesn't work as expected, or they think of something better the next day, they simply pull it or replace it. They absolutely do not worry about "publicly testing" a feature, because people expect the Web (like Life) to be constantly changing.

This was an immense revelation to me, and I've learned that I can effectively apply it to ongoing efforts in Life.

What's Your Microsoft prediction for 2011?

The Seattle Times Microsoft Pri0 blog asks: What's Your Microsoft prediction for 2011? Well, here are mine:

Steve Ballmer will... co-star with "Little Frank" Colacurcio on a new reality show, "Real CEOs of the West Coast"

Microsoft's stock will... replace Lunesta as the most popular sleep aid

Windows Phone 7 will... prevent most users from walking into telephone poles

The iPad will... continue to be the "really don't need/must have" item of the year

Bing will... continue to exacerbate my attention deficit disorder

Here are other reader responses.

The Day That Changed Us

For some time now, I've been considering what to write, and indeed whether to write anything about 9-11. It is a day upon which every blogger in the galaxy shall no doubt post some deeply felt thought, or deeply emoted political rant.

And probably virtually all posts will begin with a discourse of "what I was doing that sunny Autumn morning in 2001." Like the "where were you when Kennedy was killed?" of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, this will be the "where were you when..." of our latter days.

As traumatic as that day was, and the blanching horror of its unfolding, it is what happened directly after that I'm concerned with here. Our culture immediately precipitated into two distinct phases: those committed to restoring peace by any means, and those committed to the integrity of the nation by any means. There is nobility in both impulses, no doubt, though many of us have learned that they are mutually exclusive. But it's only an observation--please don't mistake this for a political rant. I'm digging for deeper ore.

When a piece of iron is struck hard, the atoms within are suddenly shocked out of their crystalline lattice, and in a split second align with the Earth's magnetic field. Some to the North, some to the South, now irreversibly aligned. Our nation was similarly struck on that day, September 11, 2001. If I were to say that we were all changed forever, would it be a cliche? Yes--but it's one of those cliches repeated because they are so true.

This much may have been obvious, at least to you who lived it. But it is strange for me to look at birthdates of children--some as old as 9 now--for whom all this happened in the dim ancient history before they existed. And it is hard for me to imagine too in some ways, for I was different then. In fact I was a different person. The cells in a human being's body live for seven years, to be replaced by other cells. So in a sense, the organic structure that comprises the person that is you is regenerated every seven years. Beyond that biological trivium, I firmly believe that people change--psychically and spiritually--sometimes so drastically that the old person is cast aside. There is redemption and damnation and purgatorial transfiguration, all at our own hand and under our own will. The catalyst is history.

In those days I had no desire or use for children. I despised the squalid little things. I had better things to do with my life and time. Only a fundamentally different person could want to adopt a very strong willed, stubborn, difficult, devious, obsessive, sometimes impossible, and physically very strong child. Now I've discovered that the same little monster can be brilliant, deeply loving, and fascinatingly creative.

The day that changed us is never from an external event; it's always something we determine for ourselves. It may seem a happy cycling of events, from bad to good. But something now haunts me. Someday, I will have to explain 9-11 to my daughter. I will have to explain Evil.

I hope I'm not underestimating my child (again). But it's not enough to explain that "bad men did this." Every child understands that. Not even I comprehend what went into this atrocity. It is so repulsive, so... filthy, that I feel almost that I were abusing this child even to talk about it.

Unfortunately, there is no ignoring it. The children will find the most shocking of these videos and watch them. They always do. They are morbidly curious and always outwit our attempts at censorship.

If I've learned anything from being a parent, it's that children ask when they're ready to listen. When the question comes, I don't know what I will say. It will have to come from my deeply held beliefs, my experiences, and whatever poor understanding I've managed to glean from the wisdom of the generations. And it will have to be said clearly and simply.

Obviously, I am not up to the task. But on the day that changed me, I volunteered for things like this.

Wee Barbarians

I shall confess here and now that I have never been completely comfortable with children. It's something we are made to be ashamed of, as a favorite Hollywood conceit tells us that people who prefer not to be around children are very bad people, not to be trusted, possibly conservative toetappers. It is in fact the opposite--people who like children a bit too much are to be suspected.

But I have digressed already.

My daughter is now in preschool, a kind of advanced placement program to help one's children get into the very best Kindergartens. In dropping her off and bringing her home, I have been in contact with some of her classmates, and countless billions of germs as well. But I have found to my delight that I really enjoy interacting with children and their incandescent little skulls.

I learn so much from these wee barbarians, for that is what they are. What we call Innocence is actually a primitive and brutally honest packaging of our own impulses, except in bodies too small and cute to do much damage. When they are displeased with some breaking of the order, there is no passive-aggressive blocking of lanes or presentation of the birdfinger; they simply push the transgressor's oversized head down a sliding board. I can almost see the wisdom of making preschools gun-free zones, for in them a real potential for mayhem exists.

What we as adults forget is that children's senses are hypercharged; they perceive things openly and directly; colors are so vivid as to be almost tasted. And surroundings are viewed as much more imposing. I stood aside at her school's tiny playground--an average sized yard, really--and tried to see the playset and the trees and the sky as they did. I mostly felt sad because it was so very hard for my dulled senses, jaded over nearly half a century. I felt touches of it only when I walked down a basement stairwell to look up at the fence, playset, and teachers, and imagined them to be 20 feet tall.

At bedtime I always read H a story. If I'm feeling playful of an evening, I might improvise. What's interesting is that when I make up a story, H is entertained, and that is the aim, but I take some learning from it. A couple of her favorite themes are vicious beasts, such as grizzly bears, arctic wolves, and bumbles (Sasquatches), and punishments for wicked children. Children are not particularly interested in warm morality tales, save that bad children are punished in extravagantly cruel ways, and besides, what morals the kids take away may be imposed ruthlessly on others.

Out of these tales has arisen a hero of sorts, from the German folk tale of Knecht Ruprecht ("Servant Rupert"), a dark figure whom Santa Claus employs to punish bad children. Children are fascinated by the Santa trope insofar as it cajoles them into a sense of morality (admittedly artificial, at first) that nevertheless allows them to reckon their potential year-end haul for being good. It is rewarding but tedious. What is really satisfying about the Ruprecht legend is what happens to other rotten little bastards who trangress The Rules.

It is a splendid tale to frighten the bejeezus out of the little skulls, and it goes something like this:

Ruprecht arrives every year to leave coal or other droppings in the stockings of badly behaved children. True delinquents receive a good switching, or possibly a sjambok to the soles of the feet if Herr Ruprecht is in a foul mood that evening. But the worst of the worst, the truly rotten and irredeemable, are put into a giant sack and Shanghaied to his castle for a year of purgatorial labor.

Now, if Santa lives at the North Pole, where must Ruprecht live? This provides the opportunity to grope the globe and learn a bit of geography. At the opposite end, of course--the South Pole! Here the very worst children are brought for horrible punishments. The young mind is eager to know all details. What happens to these wickeds?

Rupprecht wears a costume similar to Santa's, except it's green with black fur trim, the opposite of Santa's colors. No quaint sleigh and charming reindeer either for this adversary of the bads. On Christmas Eve, Ruprecht travels the world over in a green and black Zeppelin powered by flying penguins. He metes out punishment in his penal colony at the South Pole. In the prison, like Dante's Inferno, each punishment is diabolically engineered to fit the child's sin.

Kids who are mean to animals are given honeysuckle soap to bathe in, and are beset upon incessantly by insects and woodpeckers that painfully peck the vermin off them. Braggarts are fed a special kind of supergenerative bean casserole, so they can puff up all they like. Liars find that Whopperslugs have crawled into their ears overnight, special slugs that expand, contract, and squirm tortuously whenever a lie is told. This, because liars spend their time filling others' ears with abominations.

For dinner, junk food and candy gluttons are given mud soup with turnip, plus sandwiches made with real sand and a little peanut butter. Tattlers have lead weights suspended by a string tied to their tongues. Cheaters and kids who take credit for others' work are tarred upon arrival, so that all manner of things--paper, pillows, utensils--stick to them. Bullies wear a kind of mail made of pennies; they move so slowly that would-be victims can simply pace off to a safe distance and mock them. And the lowest of the low, graffitists (especially those who consider themselves artists) are tickled unto incontinence but also rather nicely decorated by having paint-covered worms crawl over their armpits, backs of the knees, and between the toes.

Ruprecht has installed tubes leading to his dining room so that the ghastly screams can be piped in while he sups. An elaborate panel of tuning knobs allows him to bring up the low moans and attenuate the shrillest shrieks, for a more enjoyable listening experience. So beware, all ye who have been extra naughty.

Rulebreakers and intransigents are made to sit in their nudity on a giant ice cube. And made to sleep on a tray of hard, uncooked peas. Or cooked, depending on the foulness of Ruprecht's mood. The really hard cases spend six minutes a day in a tiled room where an ill-tempered Chinese nanny waits with black rubber gloves, a jar of chili paste, and a much-applied wire brush.

The punishments are not at all meant to be remedial. Ruprecht has tired of redemption ("I so hate it vhen dey repent.") and believes that he is an unappreciated artist, for truly deserved punishment is a lost art.

Perhaps you, gentle reader, have been likewise naughty and your curiosity has been piqued. You have been mostly good, but not entirely. You would like to know what reward lies in store for you. You will have to wait for the rest of the story. The fear lingers at the end of the allotted time. We never outgrow it.

25 Years After

It's amazing how the mind, especially the part called the "male mind," works. One day I stumbled upon the music video of Yes' "Owner Of A Lonely Heart" on YouTube, and began wallowing in nostalgia about the 80s, completely unaware of the significance that that day was our 25th wedding anniversary. On some level, though, I must have known it.

Men have a strange way of approaching sentimentality. They will feel a sorrowful yearning or bittersweet ache for a particular event or a phase of their lives, set about by some old movie or song, and usually intensified during a brew or five. But it shall never occur to them that a particular day might be an important anniversary or even their own birthday. And they are often found shopping on Christmas Eve.

Neither will they communicate to their beloved anything about this orgy of wallowing historicity, and most certainly not any of their feelings about it. I'm not even sure I understand mine.

For us, the 80s were a tough time, and the music itself not very good. In contrast, the music of the 70s and 90s is generally much more well conceived and executed. Yet the music of the 80s, mostly very trite, stirs a great sadness. I think it is because it makes me think of all the promise of a young couple, and the long road since then. It hasn't been a sad story, but such a long journey is poignant.

Perhaps we feel regret for the mistakes we made, or our failure to make situations better, or harsh things we have said. But we shouldn't think that--life was just as we made it and we make it better as learn more about it. And the only way to learn about it is to make bad decisions.

I thought I had something profound to say about time and memory, but it has slipped by somehow. At any rate, here is the music:

Trip through the 80s - A Video Compilation

Gary Numan - Are Friends Electric?

Gary Numan - Cars

Gary Numan - I Die You Die

What Gary is up to these days

A-ha - Take On Me

Big In Japan - Alphaville

Men Without Hats - Safety Dance (the most inexplicable band name, song title, and video theme of the 80s)

And the video that launched me on an orgy of sentimentality:

Yes - Owner Of A Lonely Heart (full-length official video)

I thought that this last classic, voted best video of the 80s if I remember correctly, could not be improved upon--yet perhaps it can:

Max Graham vs Yes - Owner Of A Lonely Heart (2004)