Pretty Good on Paper

I’ve been trying to decide whether or not to post this, and prairieflounder’s beer post pushed me over the edge today. (I guess it might not be obvious exactly why. It was because of number 24, below, and number 60. I’m not sure of the relationship between these and “being a man.” But, then again, there are lots of these oddities in the list that follows.)

The list is from Esquire, apparently the same infamous issue that brought us the Kylie Cyrus / Annie Liebowitz controversy. The rules to this meme are to 1) copy the list, 2) bold the ones that you are able to do, 3) unbold the others, 4) post it and tag at least two others. I’ll upload all of the ensuing lists, run the numbers, and post the frequencies as soon as there is a good enough sample, probably sometime this summer. (For an example of this, see this post.) Oh, and I tag prairieflounder and Turkish Prawn.

A Man Should Be Able To:

1. Give advice that matters in one sentence.

2. Tell if someone is lying.

3. Take a photo.

4. Score a baseball game.

5. Name a book that matters.

6. Know at least one musical group as well as is possible.

7. Cook meat somewhere other than the grill.

8. Not monopolize the conversation.

9. Write a letter.

10. Buy a suit.

11. Swim three different strokes.

12. Show respect without being a suck-up.

13. Throw a punch.

14. Chop down a tree.

15. Calculate square footage.

16. Tie a bow tie.

17. Make one drink, in large batches, very well.

18. Speak a foreign language.

19. Approach a woman out of his league.

20. Sew a button.

21. Argue with a European without getting xenophobic or insulting soccer.

22. Give a woman an orgasm so that he doesn’t have to ask after it.

23. Be loyal.

24. Know his poison, without standing there, pondering like a dope.

25. Drive an eightpenny nail into a treated two-by-four without thinking about it.

26. Cast a fishing rod without shrieking or sighing or otherwise admitting defeat.

27. Play gin with an old guy.

28. Play go fish with a kid.

29. Understand quantum physics well enough that he can accept that a quarter might, at some point, pass straight through the table when dropped.

30. Feign interest.

31. Make a bed.

32. Describe a glass of wine in one sentence without using the terms nutty, fruity, oaky, finish, or kick.

33. Hit a jump shot in pool.

34. Dress a wound.

35. Jump-start a car (without any drama). Change a flat tire (safely). Change the oil (once).

36. Make three different bets at a craps table.

37. Shuffle a deck of cards.

38. Tell a joke.

39. Know when to split his cards in blackjack.

40. Speak to an eight-year-old so he will hear.

41. Speak to a waiter so he will hear.

42. Talk to a dog so it will hear.

43. Install: a disposal, an electronic thermostat, or a lighting fixture without asking for help.

44. Ask for help.

45. Break another man’s grip on his wrist.

46. Tell a woman’s dress size.

47. Recite one poem from memory.

48. Remove a stain.

49. Say no.

50. Fry an egg sunny-side up.

51. Build a campfire.

52. Step into a job no one wants to do.

53. Sometimes, kick some ass.

54. Break up a fight.

55. Point to the north at any time.

56. Create a play-list in which ten seemingly random songs provide a secret message to one person.

57. Explain what a light-year is.

58. Avoid boredom.

59. Write a thank-you note.

60. Be brand loyal to at least one product.

61. Cook bacon.

62. Hold a baby.

63. Deliver a eulogy.

64. Know that Christopher Columbus was a son of a bitch. Your understanding of your heroes must evolve.

65. Throw a baseball over-hand with some snap.

66. Throw a football with a tight spiral.

67. Shoot a 12-foot jump shot reliably.

68. Find his way out of the woods if lost.

69. Tie a knot.

70. Shake hands.

71. Iron a shirt.

72. Stock an emergency bag for the car.

73. Caress a woman’s neck.

74. Know some birds.

75. Negotiate a better price.

I spent much of my free time the last two days reading Nothing to Lose, the latest Jack Reacher thriller by Lee Child. In fact, I took half the day off yesterday, partly because the weather was so warm, for a change, but partly because I just wanted to read it.

It has been nearly a year since I started reading Child’s addictive series, of which this is the eleventh. All of the previous ten I have read more than once. So when I found out that the book was available already at the U.K. version of Amazon.com, I ordered it and sent my pounds thither posthaste.

I don’t quite get why it was released on March 24th in that backward land across the sea, but it won’t be released in the United States until June 3. There are some editing changes to be made, I know. But how long does it take to replace all the instances of “tyre” with “tire?” “Kerb” with “curb?” “Oestrogen” with “estrogen?” I suppose that they will have to sort out all of the instances where, for example “organisation” must be changed to “organization,” and sort out the other s-z issues.

And there are some words that seem to have made the jump across the pond already. The Smiths brought the word “spanner” with them packed in one of my favorite rhymes of all time:

I broke into the palace
with a sponge and a rusty spanner,
She said “I know you and you cannot sing.”
I said “that’s nothing, you should hear me play piano.”

So now we all know that a spanner is a pipe wrench.

Oh, and the covers had to be different, too, because the UK version had to show a picture of what a town in Colorado might look like (above), whereas in America these have been carefully branded over the years as a target with a bullet hole in it (below).

I guess all of the punctuation marks should be put on the other sides of quotation marks, too, so there’s one more thing to do before releasing the book here. Probably the publishers want to spare themselves having to answer irate letters from American readers complaining about [nonexistent] typographical errors.

At any rate, now that it will be another year before I get to read another Jack Reacher novel. Does anyone out there know of any books as entertaining as these with a similar hero?

It has been a long time since I put up a picture of my dog. Surprising, really, considering how photogenic she is. Click the thumbnail for a bigger version.

Maggie is a little tired in this picture, having spent most of the day outraged at the squirrels across the street. These squirrels were fortifying their nests with leaves, because it has been unseasonably cold and windy, lately. They are pretty well camouflaged, normally, but when they are carrying a bundle of dead leaves they are pretty easy to spot.

She will be turning two years old in just a couple of short months. My, how time flies.

I’m posting this because it has been sitting around on my hard drive doing nothing for almost a year. Names have been changed, naturally.

The furniture store-owner’s son walked me to a tall stack of chests of drawers, unfinished pine, sticky with sap. Like the trees they came from, they smelled cleaner than they were. He said “do you think you can take the top one down?”

I tried not to be distracted by his goofy grin. It could have been caused by an accident, I thought. He had several large scars on his cheeks that maybe tightened the skin above the corners of his mouth. They say that if you smile, your mood will follow in the wake of that facial expression. Must be nice to be perpetually amused.

I didn’t think about the chest’s drawers until I got it half-way down to the ground. They slid out a bit, and I almost dropped it as its weight shifted. I had to wrestle it down quickly. I wanted to hit him but I faked a smile instead. He mistook my dumb luck and haste for strength, I think. The rest of the interview centered on what hours I could work.

I probably got the job because I was a college kid, like him. He went to the same school, before he dropped out to run the warehouse. Poor grades and a couple of drunk driving arrests had brought ultimata from parents re-convinced of the pointlessness of higher education.

The memories of college he still had were fond, and as the only member of his family to attend, he thought himself the family brain, although they probably employed him to keep an eye on him, to manage the family reputation.

He decided that I was stronger than his father thought, that he could report that I had passed the test-Daddy had been wrong about another college kid. When would Dad learn?

I was ready to start that weekend, but he wasn’t, having accidentally doused his pants leg with ant poison and not thought carefully enough about possible consequences. A customer found him quivering, frothing at the mouth, on the warehouse floor, and he had to spend Saturday and Sunday in the shower, drinking water to dilute the nerve toxins.

“Zippy,” what all the salespeople called him, was late Monday morning, understandably, I guess. So I had to wait at the store until he came in to open the warehouse. It seemed reckless, to me, given the owner’s temper, to call his son “Zippy.” But somebody explained that morning, in a hushed voice “his mom and dad think we call him that because he races around, doing a dozen things at once. I call him “Zippy” cause he’s a F—ing idiot.”

He was an idiot, in some ways, but he didn’t slash through the top of a box with a razor knife, scratching through several layers of lacquer and about an eighth of an inch of wood. That was me, a morning of that first week. He didn’t turn a corner too quickly with a lop-sided headboard, trying to grab it as it crashed against the floor. That was me again, broken pieces clunking inside the box while I hid it behind some others, later that same week. We all make mistakes. The key is not to let them eat up the profits.

Dave, the other new guy, looked ill when we got to the warehouse, sitting outside, back against the wall. But he was just pale and thin.

In just a week he had learned not to exert himself unnecessarily. He didn’t even look up as we got out of Zippy’s truck. A big eighteen-wheeler was at the dock already, driver already out and walking towards us. I went in to take a look around. Dave stayed up front to deal with Zippy and the driver.

Soon, Dave found me in the back. “Hey,” I said to him.

“Ninety-six iceboxes coming, let me show you where Zippy wants ‘em.”

I followed him. Standing up, he was tall, but not as tall as me, freckles, dark brown hair and eyes under a fitted high-school baseball cap. We walked almost all the way up to the loading door. Not too far to carry the iceboxes. But the empty spot was only four feet wide.

“Ninety-six?”

He nodded, face an unreadable blank.

For some reason, about half the profit the company made that summer was in oak iceboxes with brass handles. They looked like antique iceboxes, the kind they used to store food in, but these were used as end tables or television stands mostly, two feet tall a foot and one-half wide, maybe a foot deep, slightly top-heavy because their tops were solid wood, and front-heavy because of the door. This shipment came in cardboard boxes.

I was a few days newer than Dave, so I told him I’d try to talk Zippy into expanding the space, or putting them somewhere else, but Zippy didn’t take well to logic, like the rest of the family.

For instance, the warehouse was laid out in alphabetical order, by manufacturer’s name, with glaring exceptions that annoyed his peevish mother. Since stock fluctuated constantly, the spaces had to be adjusted repeatedly, and the furniture had to be repaired repeatedly, before being sold.

I found him and told him the iceboxes wouldn’t fit.

“‘Slike, no problem,” he said, nodding and looking into my eyes the way he always did when he knew he didn’t know what he was talking about, when he made up his stories. It was as if he thought that he would find your soul in there if he looked hard enough. Maybe he thought he could see your brain, or his own, or his reflection, or a horsey, I don’t know. It wasn’t a hard, intimidating sort of stare; it was searching, childlike. I looked away and he got up and came to help us, to prove himself right.

There was room for only two rows, eight-feet deep, which started getting pretty high. Soon Zippy decided to build steps in one of the rows. I grabbed a box, handed it to Dave. He handed it up to Zippy, who kept building up.

When we got to a height of seven boxes, the whole mess started wobbling, of course. So Zippy grabbed a couple of wooden planks from somewhere and put them on top of row seven, thinking it would stabilize things. Maybe it did for a while.

Then half-way through level eight I handed a box to Dave, who wasn’t looking at me anymore at all, he kept his eyes on Zippy and the shaking stack of boxes as he reached down to me. He saw it let go before I did, crouched and dove for a leather sofa. I dropped a box and backed away as the top four levels came crashing down.

Dave got the worst of it, I think, unless you count the iceboxes, which would now fit much more easily, now that they were smashed. He hit the sofa, but at least one of the boxes caught him in the small of the back, leaving a huge welt near his kidneys and knocking his breath out. He was too angry to talk anyway.

Zippy fell right into the avalanche, which might have been the safest place, although he was battered, bloody and bruised. Probably lingering traces of any poison deadened the pain-he kept his silly smile. None hit me, but I felt pretty bad for Dave, who had amazing self control. Perhaps he blamed himself.

I was almost surprised to see Dave the next day. But the injuries seemed to give him a new sense of confidence. He was sitting up straighter and seemed glad to see me. I was planning on spending my next day off looking for work, but that was still two days away.

“One hundred-twenty barstools on the truck outside. Zip wants them on the rack.”

The rack had been built a couple of months before we were hired, but was only half-full of furniture, because it was fifteen feet high, with three shelves, and there was no mechanical lift.

“What the . . .?”

“Zip says he’ll be on the rack. He wants us to throw them up to him, he said.”

For the rest of the day we took turns hurling boxes of barstools at the boss, just like he asked, except maybe harder. Sometimes they fell back down after hitting him. And sometimes we’d even try to slow their descent, just for the look of the thing.

I’ve never been able to quite duplicate the simple joy that physical labor gave me that day, hurling heavy, lopsided boxes at him, while safe on the ground. Even so, sometimes I’d just hand the boxes to Dave. It meant even more to him.

I was ironing a shirt this morning and had the Today Show on (yeah, I know) and they were talking about this Web 2.0 site called Juicycampus.com. If you haven’t heard already, the site encourages people at any of 50 (so far) college campuses to post juicy rumors about others, completely anonymously. Open to abuse? No, more like open for the sole purpose of abuse. The campus at which I work is not one of the favored few (yet, of course), which is sad; I hate to be left out of new trends, especially when self-destruction is so glaringly immanent.

At any rate, it made me think of this delightful passage of a delightful book called Microserfs, by Douglas Coupland. [One of my favorites, honestly. It is The Soul of a New Machine for Generation X.] The book concerns a group of playful geeks who quit their jobs at Microsoft to build a video game. One of them, at some point in the book, writes a bit of code that allows any of the seven or so people coding the game to post rumors anonymously. Things quickly get out of hand, of course. He pulls the plug, to much relief on everyone’s part, after about 24 hours.

What’s different about juicycampus.com, of course, is that the company’s founder, Matt Ivester, already graduated from Duke, in 2005. So he is not subject to the stream of junk that afflicts all of the people at these colleges. Perhaps Matt would feel differently if someone, perhaps someone who knew Matt at Duke (or perhaps knew him at Clemson, before he was kicked out because of that Harry Potter Fan Club fiasco), maybe one of his frat buddies, posted some gossip about Matt.

Or not.

Raincoaster has guilted me into posting, I’m afraid. On the post below, which was about how I was being very good and exercising three times a week, she comments:

Yes, but what kind of BLOGGING equipment do you use? And do you use it three times a week??????????????

Well, no. One glance at the dates on my last few posts and you will quickly find yourself reading about things that happened in October.

Raincoaster is right, of course, as usual. I fooled myself into believing that I was keeping in good blogging form because my job requires me to use a similar skill-set. I write for a living and analyze things and am called upon to have opinions about things, and I thought that would be enough. But my blogging muscles are now flabby and atrophied. I will try to do better, Raincoaster, honestly, I will.

If anyone is responsible for keeping this blogging and social networking stuff alive in the coming years, it will be people like raincoaster. Yeah, it’s scary, but that’s one of the reasons you like her, isn’t it?

A couple of people have asked me what sort of strength-training equipment I have in my home gym. It is hard to describe a power rack to people who haven’t seen one before. They are certainly not the sort of thing you will see if you go to your local sporting goods store and look around. I suspect that’s because they don’t cost very much money. This one was only $300 on ebay, delivered (and it was about 200lbs, so the delivery costs would have been substantial.) Once you have one of these things (below), and the bland-looking bench inside it (plus a barbell and weights), you have pretty much everything you need to begin the strength-training program that I have undertaken–Stronglifts 5X5.

Before I ordered this rack thing in January I was lifting weights using a couple of saw horses as a spotter. That was OK on squats, but when I started getting above 120lbs, the bench press began to look and feel a little scary-couldn’t use the sawhorses, they were too high. Twenty-five reps can be pretty challenging, even if you split them into five sets. Twice I had to tilt one side of the barbell onto the cement floor and find a way out from under it during a set (well, I guess it was at the end of the set). I just couldn’t see myself doing that with the truly massive weights I will eventually be hefting, so I decided to make the investment.

Unfortunately, to use a power rack, your barbell has to have enough distance between the weights so that the weights are on the outside of the rack. Olympic-size bars are perfect for this, but if you already bought regular, non-olympic weights, they won’t fit on an olympic-size bar–the holes in the middle aren’t big enough. Luckily, I found a place in Salem, New Hampshire that sold extra-wide bars for regular-size weights. So I’m still out like $500 for the whole set-up, without the weights, but since I used to spend that for just three months of tennis, I think I’m still ahead of the game.

Oh, I had one more accessory I needed, because my son began the program, too. He’s only a skinny ten-year-old (five feet tall, already, getting his height from his pop). And the stronglifts program is based on adding weight each time you work out. And the smallest I could find were 2.5 pound weights. But adding five pounds (one 2.5 lb weight on each side) every workout, when you are a tall, stick-thin, ten-year-old could be pretty discouraging. I needed some 1.25 pound weights, so I made some. I took two plastic 5-gallon paint can lids, drilled a hole through them and stuck them together with enough latex caulk to make them total 1.25 pounds. Then I taped the outside with black duck tape. Then I sprayed them with black paint. Don’t they look cool?

Next step is to paint numbers on them. My son wants them to say 40 lbs, which seems about right. They are only slightly smaller than the 50 lb weights I have.

You know those motivational posters that some people (people people, obviously) have in their offices? I don’t really want to post a picture of one of them because people are still trying to make money selling them, and they make me wince, somewhat involuntarily and think uncharitable thoughts, but click here if you really don’t know what I am talking about.

Anyway, I work in a fundraising office, so I used to see these things everywhere. For a while, mine was the only office (not including cubes, just the ones with doors) on the floor of my building that didn’t sport one of those posters. I remember wanting to ask my boss whether they were purchased with state funds, since we were on a mailing list for a company that made them.

I was thinking about them for the last couple of mornings because when I take the dog out I am confronted every morning with the vision below. It is a little hard to see with the crappy quality of my cellphone camera. This morning’s unexpected snow obscures the fact that the leaf had fallen on about two inches of solid ice about a week ago. As the leaf absorbed the sunlight it melted its way through about 3/4 of an inch of that ice. It’s a metaphor for something, I kept thinking.

But I don’t really have any idea what it is a metaphor for. The slogan above is a hipshot [My lovely wife asked me last night when I was going to post again. She has started a blog and has more excitement about the whole thing than I have had in quite a while. For some odd reason I told her I would post today. So you have her to thank.] Here’s another one:

Erosion: An unintentional benefit of being opaque.

Please feel free to suggest better ones in the comments.

Thinking about that leaf led me to think about those motivational posters, so I looked them up, and there’s a site that lets you make your own, of course. I must have missed out when this thing got Boing Boinged.

It also got me to wondering what it is that people get from these things. Do people really draw motivation from this stuff? I have been reading Darren Brown’s Tricks of the Mind, or at least re-reading sections of it, this week. He points out that motivation is a strange sort of reification. People only talk about motivation in a negative way, he says. They only use the word if motivation is lacking. All that “being motivated” means is that you are working. It doesn’t really mean anything, as such. I’m still thinking about that.

What I am certain of is that I get stuff done when I can keep my sense of humor. So whether these posters are funny in an ironic or sarcastic way, or whether the posters are sarcastic and, thus, funny in a straightforward way, I draw motivation (however fictitious the concept itself is) from them. Sort of a paradoxical sort of thing, iznit?

I was chatting earlier this week with prairieflounder, and I mentioned that WordPress had upped the capacity for individual blogger accounts to three gigabytes. I noted that I had purchased some extra capacity from WordPress last year, because I was moving quickly up towards the limit. Pf pointed out that he hadn’t noticed a lot of pictures here. That’s because there are a couple of different types of people who visit this site. Most of the visitors I get are still people looking at folding diagrams, believe it or not. About 90 percent, on average. And the people who don’t visit for those pics, tend not to even notice them.

And that’s O.K., but here’s another post for the 90 percent.

My first funded year in graduate school I ended up grading papers for a brilliant-if-cranky professor who, despite being only 35ish, still took notes on 3 x 5 cards. I’ve noticed that a lot of the history professors who attended top-ten schools (which he did) do this, and I even know one attending a top-ten school right now, who uses 3 x 5 cards. The guy I worked for would often photocopy articles, however, and cut out the relevant sections, parts of a work that he might later cite or quote in his own work, for example, and tape them to a 3 x 5 card, folding them several times, if need be, so that they would fit in his 3 x 5 file.

Yeah, it didn’t look all that elegant. It was pretty messy, actually. But the guy wasn’t all that elegant himself; he was well-published and highly regarded, however.

It has troubled me for some time that there is no elegant way of folding a normal (in the US) 8.5 x 11 inch piece of paper so that it stays nice and flat and can be filed away with the rest of your 3 x 5 cards.

Until now, that is. This method is so simple that I hesitated to post it. It is based on the simplest and most common letterfold. But I can’t seem to find any posts of it anywhere else, so here you go:

Start with an 8.5 x 11 inch piece of paper (all of the pix below expand into their own, larger, window when you click upon them with a mouse or similar rodent). This is especially nice paper made by Gold Fiber, which is not only a pleasing and frightfully absorbent texture, but has lines on one side and a grid on the other. Notebook paper doesn’t get much nicer than this, I’m afraid.

Put a 3 x 5 inch index card in the middle of it, roughly, and fold the top down so that it looks like this:

Then fold the top down, like this:

You want all of these folds to hug the index card as closely as you can. Next, fold the bottom up like this:

Then fold one side in over the card like this:

And then the other, like this:

Then take the card out and unfold the whole thing so that it looks like this:

Fold the top and bottom towards the center so that it forms a flattened tube eight and a half inches wide, and then tuck whichever side is smaller into the inside of the tube on the opposite side, which will, presumably, be larger and more accommodating. In this case, the right side was slightly larger. One side always is, for some reason.

Then, keep sliding it in until the whole thing is flat. If done perfectly, it will be only slightly larger than a 3 x 5 index card, so that not only will it hold index cards itself, it will still fit into files that hold index cards of that size, or even the cool little pocket in a moleskine notebook, like this one.

Not that this history professor could have been bothered to make things tidy like this. But you like to keep things neat.

I just got a new Blackberry last week. Lovely, sleek little device, and I must confess that I’ve always wanted one, even before they started actually making them. I wanted something that would let you type in text and store it and send it places, etc.

But what amazes me is that I can already see what they do to people a little more clearly. If you attend meetings with others who have these things you are already familiar with how distracting they are. Any time an email comes in, these people pull theirs out and look at it to see if the email is something important. My assumption was always something like the following:

What a jerk. They actually don’t know how insulting it is to constantly monitor some hand-held electronic device while somebody is talking about something that they consider important.

And I immediately draw the following conclusion: This person is stupid.

But I have revised my analysis a little, after getting one of these myself. You see, these people didn’t start out stupid. Actually it was the reverse (no, really, bear with me for a second.) They rise up in the company hierarchy because of their brains and other abilities. Then the organization decides that they need to have access to a constant stream of data, so that they can be more efficient. They must be constantly available for consultation. They are then given a Blackberry, or Treo, or other electronic device that does this sort of thing (even phones which are used for instant messaging, I suppose, although I know very few executives who would do this).

The stupidity creeps in at that point, the receipt of this handheld device. The experience of being outfitted with one of these things has, thus far, reminded me of a great story by the late Kurt Vonnegut, “Harrison Bergeron.” In this story the United States government makes everyone equal by imposing handicaps on the most able. So if you have really good vision, they give you blurry glasses, for example. Or if you are really strong, they make your clothing really heavy (although I have doubts about this one; the clothing would just make you increasingly stronger.) Finally, if you are very smart, the government makes you wear a radio-earphone thing that emits a loud, irritating buzzing noise every once and a while to break your concentration.

Which is where the Blackberry comes in, of course. These people started out relatively intelligent. But the constant interruptions handicapped them.

The thing was sitting on the counter buzzing away this morning while I was trying to help my son with his mathematics. My wife, just back from Peru, said “aren’t you going to check it?” That’s when it all came together for me. Math’s hard enough, without a Blackberry going off.

My capable IT person showed me how to shut the stupid thing off. So now I’m all set.