Asparagus pee, Gooblek & Other Neat stuff
Time to take this bull by the horns and milk it.
My healthcare organization is Kaiser Permanente, and this is an actual image from their “refill a prescription” page. Maybe it’s just me, but something here doesn’t seem right.
The good news is that they have adopted one of my best ideas — to print a description of the pill on the bottle. It’s a great idea, even if they didn’t get it from me.
So Oprah’s been at it again, and the big new buzz is a book and a movie called The Secret. It’s basically just a rehash of a bunch of old stuff like the law of attraction, positive thinking, affirmations, and karma. No great harm, but as my mentor Jim Rhon says, “Affirmation without labor is the beginning of delusion.”
Well, here’s a great big bashing review over at skeptic.com:
The Secret behind The Secret
(Scroll down when you get there.)
“He who works with his hands is a laborer.
He who works with his hands and his head
is a craftsman. He who works with his hands
and his head and his heart is an artist.”
–St. Francis, religious leader
Here’s a long NY Times article by Michael Pollan, the author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma that I recommend you read, a further diatribe on the shortcomings of the American Diet.
His conclusion? Try to eat more food.
Our 2nd-grade daughter Emily was given the assignment to “Write a story about a soldier who sees a horse behind a tree — use all the words in the box [soldier, story, behind]. Here’s how it turned out:
Once I was a soldier in an old old fairy tale and in that fairy tale I saw a horse that got out of a farm. So the horse hid behind a tree so I ride it back to the farm. And that story was a good one wasn’t it? The End.
(The teacher’s red pen says “Yes.”)
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Gosh it’s been so long, I could list hundreds of links here, but to keep it short, I’ll just do a few recent favorites:
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I’ve been reading The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams, who, besides being friends with Henry and William James, and the whole Emerson family, was the grandson of John Quincy Adams, and thus the great grandson of John Adams. Speaking of himself and school, he said:
“He hated it because he was herded together with a crowd of boys and compelled to learn by memory a quantity of things that did not amuse him.”
I think that’s a real gem, but to unearth one of these, you have to wade through hours of tedious first-person history of the Union’s legation to England during the Civil War.
Last Thursday, we had our once a year every few years snowfall that actually amounted to enough to play in. I went out late in the evening and took this picture of our pool in the snow – it’s a little grainy looking because it’s a long exposure with available light. Click for a bigger version. (It was much prettier in real life.)
This is pretty cute – there’s a whole series of stop action animation skits using old Star Trek action figures. (This is also my first You Tube post.)
