Free trip

Enjoy!

I can’t find the origin of this quote, so it appears here without attribution. If anybody knows the author, speak up! I suspect it’s that prolific writer, Anonymous.

Anyway, here goes:

Life on earth may be expensive, but it does include a free trip around the sun.

And you’d probably have to pay millions for that to do it in a space ship!

So, let us remember the ordinary, every day (or every year—because, you know, you get that trip a bunch of times in an average lifespan) miracles.

Let us remember in the midst of our scrabbling for money, attention and prestige, in the midst of our political posturings and maneuverings, in the midst of our squabbles and worries, in the midst of pain and illness—

Let us remember the rising and the setting of the sun, the heron on the dock, the moonlight on the waves, the rain-washed wildflowers, the babies’ laughter, the handclasps of friendship, the wisdom of the elders.

Let us remember the taste of the fresh-picked corn, the birthday cake, the sound of birdsong, the scent of blossoms, the strength of hands.

Let us try to enjoy that free trip around the sun.

‘ Cause everything else is extra.

Anna Nicole Smith

A cautionary tale.

The short life of Anna Nicole Smith is a sad one. Ill-educated and spectacularly beautiful seems to have been a bad combination for her. Add in drugs, Playboy, and the current oddities of our culture where a person can be famous simply for being famous, and this is what you get.

Anna Nicole was born Vickie Lynn Hogan. She acquired the Smith from her first husband whom she married at the age of 17. He was 16. Not surprisingly, the marriage didn’t last long. By the age of 24, she was a stripper and auditioning for Playboy.

Marriage to a wealthy oil tycoon 62 years her senior resulted in a lengthy dispute about his will with the battle being carried out in the courts and in the tabloids.

Smith made several attempts at an acting career with her performances being critically panned. Her subsequent reality TV show made her an object of ridicule and was ultimately canceled. She became a spokesperson for TrimSpa and PETA.

Daniel Smith, the son of her first marriage, died at the age of 20 of a lethal mixture of prescription drugs shortly after the birth of her second child, a daughter. She herself died five months later, also from a lethal combination of prescription drugs.

The saga continued with the continued court battle over her second husband’s estate being complicated by a battle over the paternity of her infant daughter, and it’s not entirely clear to me where it now stands.

In 2011, the Supreme Court ruled that the bankruptcy court of California did not have the authority to decide her claims against the estate. I’m not sure where this leaves those claims or the surviving daughter.

All in all, this isn’t a Smith story of which we can be proud.

Smith once said she wanted to be the next Marilyn Monroe.

Sadly, adjusted for inflation, I think she was.

A message from Metro

Giggle while you’re reminded

Of Dumb Ways to Die.

I’m assuming this is a Public Service commercial for the British Metro system, although it’s not at all clear until the end that it has anything to do with trains. It’s also not clear to which Metro system is bringing you the ad. I’m just going by the English accent of the narrator at the end.

It’s a cute, creative video, but be warned. You’ll likely be humming this little ditty days from now.

Not so dumb

I can’t speak for “little.”

I’m talking about the blog, Dumb Little Man.

To tell you the truth, I don’t know who is behind this blog. There’s no “About” page that I can find. There’s no entry in Wikipedia.

All I know is the content.

(UPDATE: Thanks to my good friend, Michelle, for finding the “About” page. Here it is!)

The subheading of the blog is “Tips for Life.”

That’s what’s in it.

Tips.

Tips for motivation, for increasing creativity, for organizing your life, simplifying it, making it better.

Almost all of them are good advice. Clear, cogent, well-written. The site is well-designed. Easy to read. Easy to search.

The headlines to each post are masterful. “Ten ways to do this.” “Thirty secrets to that.” I’m a sucker for lists, so I love that. I figure, in a list of ten, there will almost certainly be at least one useful thing.

I like this blog so much, it’s one of the ones I have emailed to me on a daily basis. And that I actually read. There are a few blogs I get because they seemed promising, but now I skim the subject line and delete more often than not. But I read Dumb Little Man. I save a few of them. Implementation…that’s another story, but we can always hope.

I could go on citing examples, but I’d really rather you went on over to Dumb Little Man and spent your reading time there.

It will do you more good.

Ruthlessness

As a job skill.

Thankful today for ruthless physical therapists.

You wouldn’t think of ruthlessness as a job skill. Maybe in a mogul, but not in a healthcare profession. Generally speaking, you think of caring and caretaking and concern.

I suppose those are still the top skills in healthcare. Bedside manner. It’s important.

And I don’t want to imply that my physical therapists are lacking in any of that. They are careful and concerned and very friendly and sympathetic.

And ruthless.

And that is a good thing.

See, you may remember, that I have this frozen shoulder thing going on. (Yes, it hurts. And, yes, I feel old. And yes, it is slightly better now, thank you.)

I’ve been going to PT for weeks. There are pulleys and Thera-bands and weights and lengths of PVC pipe and timers and doorways for isometrics and infrared heat and lots of ice in my life. Twice a week for some of the elaborate gadgets—when I go in to the office—and twice a day for the stuff I can do at home.

In addition to all that, there always comes a time in my therapy session when one of the therapists comes along to “pull on me.” I lie on a table, and he or she takes hold of my arm and gently manipulates it in various directions.

Almost all of them are painful. Some of them seriously so.

I try not to whimper too much. (Who are we kidding? I try not to scream.)

The therapists are good, though. They watch my face. They notice when, instinctively, I tense my arm in a protective resistance.

Now, me, that’s the point where I would stop—if I were working on someone. I don’t think I have the fortitude to intentionally inflict that kind of pain.

They, on the other hand, hang in there. Another few seconds. Another millimeter. Another involuntary gasp.

They’re working for tiny increases in range of motion.

They’re getting them, too.

Ruthlessness.

It may be underrated.

The next Star Trek gadget

When can I have it?

We got the sliding doors early. And we’re so used to them now that we tend to walk right into doors marked “Pull.”

We’ve already almost got tricorders. In case you hadn’t noticed, they’ve merged with communicators. That cell phone in your pocket? That’s pretty much it—minus the scanning capability, and there are apps that come close to that.

So, I wonder what’s next? And, if it’s what I hope it is, I’m wondering when can I have it?

See, what I want is the computer’s minute-by-minute log.

I want to be able to say, “Computer. Replay Stardate gobbledygook-of-numbers, time stamp 0700.”

It’s not that I really want to give up the privacy and open the legal can of worms that recordings of every second of our lives would bring. It’s just that I really don’t want to almost be remembering things.

We lost a hubcap a few weeks ago. The MotH,* of course, wanted to replace it.

It’s not the first time we lost a hubcap. I once had four go missing all at once when I was in rehearsal on Staten Island. (You just know they didn’t all fall off on the Verrazano Bridge. And, I’d like to point out that this was Staten Island. Not Harlem or the South Bronx. So, there’s that myth disproved, too.)

Anyway, the last time we needed hubcaps, we went to a used auto parts yard somewhere out in Brooklyn, near the water, and got one. For something like $15 bucks.

The MotH figured we ought to be able to do the same here. Maybe we could. But after much calling around, none of the used auto part yards seem to have hubcaps. Hard to believe, but there it is.

Since he’s planning a trip to NY in the near future, the MotH came hopefully around to ask me if I could find the name of the place in NY that had previously solved this problem.

This was five or six years back! If not more!

And the MotH said, “But you save all that stuff.”

Uh-huh.

I don’t generally save it if you paid cash and didn’t give me a receipt. Even then, it’s buried in all the backup material I am storing in case of an audit. I might have had it noted in my financial software, but since a) I never got a receipt and b) the name did not include the word “hubcap,” that is an avenue of research that yielded no results.

But…just think…if I were stationed on the Starship Enterprise, I could have announced to the air, “Computer, stardate gobbledygook-of-numbers to stardate gobbledygook-of-numbers-part-2, replay.”

And I could have watched and listened to us discussing hubcaps and coming and going with hubcaps until I found—ta da!—the source of the hubcaps.

As it is, I had to Google.

For a new source online and a higher price.

When can I have that computer log?

Sure it’s kind of Big Brother-y. But it could save me so much aggravation!

* MotH = Man of the House

Oblique strategies

Whack your brain

A few days ago—nine or ten—I blogged about A Whack on the Side of the Head. the nudge into more creative thinking by Roger von Oech. Today’s tip is about another tool to feed your creativity.

Oblique Strategies

Oblique strategies started life as a deck of cards. Not ordinary playing cards, but a little black box full of small cards printed with “Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas.”

Created in collaboration by Brian Eno, a musician, and Peter Schmidt, an artist, these cards present you with a question, a thought, a suggestion designed to help you look at a problem in a different way.

Some of the cards will seem disconnected from your problem. Obscure. Confusing.

Sometimes, those are the best cards.

Some of them will present you with an obvious solution. (More like an obvious path, since they aren’t really solutions.)

The cards themselves don’t seem to be available anymore, except, sometimes, on eBay.

You could make your own. The full text of the various editions of the cards, as well as more history about them, on this website. There are downloadable zipped versions available at the same place for generating random cards on your own PC.

Or you can generate a random oblique strategy online here.

These are not easy if you are used to linear thinking, but they will reward you, I think.

Give it a try.

On time!

For a change.

It’s April 15th, the Ides of April, that infamous day when our taxes are due.

Year after year, my accountants have applied for an extension—partly due to their own hectic schedules during this period and partly due to my not always getting the information to them quickly enough.

But this year, I was organized. I was prompt. I busily worked on keeping all those little receipts properly stored and labeled throughout the year so that the usual last minute scramble was neither last minute nor a scramble.

I am helped, of course, by the fact that I am semi-retired so that my corporate taxes are far simpler and by the fact that Florida has no state taxes. This doesn’t let me off the hook entirely, because my business is incorporated in NY and we have rental property there. So, we still have state forms to file.

Ergo, I haven’t felt like I could dispense with the services of the accountant altogether. This may be an area where I am spending money unnecessarily.

On the other hand, I have anxiety attacks when confronted with TurboTax or the like.

I realize I am paying an accountant to transfer numbers from my Quicken reports to the appropriate lines on the tax forms. Thus far, however, I justify that expense to myself by the knowledge that she knows which numbers and which lines and that, if she is wrong, she will go talk to the IRS and leave me out of it as much as possible.

Am I overpaying? Probably.

Is it worth it? I think so.

Anyway, the miracle is that it’s April 15th, and my tax forms have already been completed and filed, and I am done!

Done!

The only thing certain is death and taxes, but neither of the G-men* are coming after me today.

* G-men = Government Man and/or the Grim Reaper

Philip H. Smith

And the Smith Chart

We have a chart! Who knew?

The only thing that could make me happier is if I could actually understand it.

If you’d like to see a Smith Chart, that there link will take you to Wikipedia.

I don’t even understand Wikipedia’s explanation of a Smith Chart: “a graphical aid or nomogram for electrical and electronics engineers specializing in radio frequency (RF) engineering to assist in solving problems with transmission lines and matching circuits.”

All I get from that is you can probably buy a book on it at Radio Shack.

Philip Hagar Smith was—you guessed it—an electrical engineer who worked for Bell Labs. His main claim to fame was the invention of the Smith Chart. He also wrote a book in 1969 called Electronic Applications of the Smith Chart: In Waveguide, Circuit, and Component Analysis.

It doesn’t sound like I’d understand much of that either.

I do wish I knew more about electronics and electricity. I’ve wished that ever since that episode I mentioned in Organized Lightning when a child actor asked. Apparently, I’ve never wished it hard enough to actually do something about it, however.

It’s on my “Someday/Maybe” list, though.

Someday, I’ll take a class.

Maybe, I’ll understand the Smith Chart.

Not so silly, really.

Except it is—sort of.

Today’s contribution of silliness is…(drumroll)…

The Carrot Museum.

And, not only the Carrot Museum, but the World Carrot Museum!

Pardon me a minute while I rofl!

I’m sorry. It just strikes me as really funny. And the icing on the cake is the website originates in the U.K. Some staid Britisher has provided us with an entire website about carrots!

In truth, it’s a fascinating site, full of much interesting information. Carrot history, tips on cultivation, recipes, and all kinds of trivia. (Remember my love of esoteric facts? I never thought to be questing after carrot quotes, but here they are.)

Anyway, I think this site has a lot to offer and is well worth a visit. When you’re done perusing it, I bet you’ll have a craving for a carrot.

Elaine Smith Writes

Anything She Wants