Salinger

I don't know much about him, but I know he spawned the best Onion article anyway:
Bunch of phonies mourn JD Salinger.
Brilliant.

Fact Check

If you're interested here's a summary of Fact Check's review of the State of the Union.
Some stretching, but mostly true.
http://www.factcheck.org/2010/01/obamas-state-of-the-union-address/

Cognitive Load

Check this out.
Stanford did a study on decision mechanisms.
Two groups were given a set of numbers to memorize. They were all told to walk down from room 101 to room 102 and recite the numbers.
Group A was given 7 numbers. You probably remember from Psych that this is the biggest chunk most people can remember so it sort of taxes your brain.
Group B was given 2 numbers. It's pretty easy to hold 2 numbers.
Now it gets cool.
En route everyone bumped into a lady with a tray of snacks. She said, "Hey Joe, thank you for your help in this study. To show our appreciation you can have some cake or some fruit salad."
Group A (lots of numbers) takes cake.
Group B (a few numbers) takes fruit.
The theory is something called cognitive load.
When we decide stuff there's a cage match--your emotional mind "Cake me! Cake me now!!" versus your rational mind "Have you thought of the calories..."
I'm trying to see how this factors in to the way I make decisions every day, but if nothing else it's an interesting study.

Unposted Post 2--Google Thinks I'm Gay

.This is an unposted post I wrote reflecting on the Virginia Tech shooting.
Google thinks I'm gay...
As an experiment for a play I was working on I set up google ads on my site. I was curious to see how it worked. Bizarelly, google thinks I'm gay. It has for some time.
Above my posts there's a little ad. Mostly for church stuff, once for simulated cat pee (?) and recently for gay related items. This would make sense to me tomorrow, when the google crawlers will have found the word gay within the copy, but I don't know what other sign I'm giving off that makes google think I'm gay. That's now what I'm writing about...just curious. Is it the hair?
The other thing...
Some time ago I was involved in what CNN called a tragedy. They pointed cameras at me and my friends. The facts of the story were pretty simple--unpredictable, senseless, crappy thing (in this case a Tornado that killed people in Cincy). The story was a big deal because it was a slow news day. It became a story about hope because we made that happen...we deliberately and methodically stayed "on message" because if people are going to point a camera at you it makes sense to leverage the redemptive potential. It became a story of hope...but it wasn't one.
Sad things, particularly ugly, violent, senseless sad things like shootings or storms become something of a national rorschach onto which we can project our own hopes or fears. This is why the VT shooting was about community, or unity, or courage, or hope, or madness, or gun control, or liberalism, or faith, or the goodness of God, or the absence of God, or existential despair, or Korean americans, depending on where we're standing.
What I struggle with is that none of this is REAL. A wack job went crazy and the walls were ripped away from our hearts. This is fine and natural, but it becomes dangerous when we project MEANING onto something senseless. Some thing's just suck and saying otherwise is reckless.
I suppose this is kind of a question about theology (in the sense that if you believe in an active God then everything is kind of about theology) but I think some times in the church we try to answer questions before spending time to shut up and live in pain for a little while.

Unpublished Post 2: Google Thinks I'm gay...

This is an unposted post I wrote reflecting on the Virginia Tech shooting.
Google thinks I'm gay...
As an experiment for a play I was working on I set up google ads on my site. I was curious to see how it worked. Bizarelly, google thinks I'm gay. It has for some time.
Above my posts there's a little ad. Mostly for church stuff, once for simulated cat pee (?) and recently for gay related items. This would make sense to me tomorrow, when the google crawlers will have found the word gay within the copy, but I don't know what other sign I'm giving off that makes google think I'm gay. That's now what I'm writing about...just curious. Is it the hair?
The other thing...
Some time ago I was involved in what CNN called a tragedy. They pointed cameras at me and my friends. The facts of the story were pretty simple--unpredictable, senseless, crappy thing (in this case a Tornado that killed people in Cincy). The story was a big deal because it was a slow news day. It became a story about hope because we made that happen...we deliberately and methodically stayed "on message" because if people are going to point a camera at you it makes sense to leverage the redemptive potential. It became a story of hope...but it wasn't one.
Sad things, particularly ugly, violent, senseless sad things like shootings or storms become something of a national rorschach onto which we can project our own hopes or fears. This is why the VT shooting was about community, or unity, or courage, or hope, or madness, or gun control, or liberalism, or faith, or the goodness of God, or the absence of God, or existential despair, or Korean americans, depending on where we're standing.
What I struggle with is that none of this is REAL. A wack job went crazy and the walls were ripped away from our hearts. This is fine and natural, but it becomes dangerous when we project MEANING onto something senseless. Some thing's just suck and saying otherwise is reckless.
I suppose this is kind of a question about theology (in the sense that if you believe in an active God then everything is kind of about theology) but I think some times in the church we try to answer questions before spending time to shut up and live in pain for a little while.

Unposted Post 1--2005

Dulles
This is the first of my old unposted posts. Keith wants to read them, and he's the only person who reads this, so why not. Also, I read tonight in "Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man" that you should never throw away old writing until you've tried to improve it.

This was originally written on 5 November 2005 and never posted.

Dulles sucks. It is the weirdest AirPort I've ever seen, and my sample population has grown dramatically in the last few years.
The being said, I met an interesting person there, and I learned some things.
She is finishing up her Oncology residency at Columbia, and since we were both convention retarded (me from a Water trade show, her from a symposium on cancer prevention) we chose to talk rather than work.
First, an aside. We had an idea in college that would be a dramatic innovation in the world of conventions. The concept was a bullshit flag. It was a flag that you could hold up during the ubiquitous "Hey I don't really know you but part of the protocol is that we talk about your cat for two minutes before we get to the point" conversation. By holding up the flag you remove the lingering guilt that must be piling up somewhere in the upper middle class subconscious from 1000 plastic conversations. Also, it's more efficient.
Anyway, back to Dulles.
We talked about global water need and other stuff about my job and then we talked about Oncology. She mentioned a change in senior health benefits that will probably cost more than Katrina, Iraq, and any Social Security reform combined.
Check this out.
1. During Bush's Medicaid Reform package they did not allow the government to negotiate with drug companies. This means that we will have to pay top dollar for prescription drugs, or in other words that the Government failed to take advantage of one of the only competitive advantages available to an organization of its size--economies of scale. That's stupid.
2. The way that the regulation is written there is a huge incentive for Big Pharma to create and market oral cancer medication because those drugs would now be prescription drugs and be purchased top dollar.
3. Demographic shifts will lead to a massive growth in the market for these drugs.
Someone needs to sack up and have political will to piss people off and do something about healthcare.

Unposted

Over the years I've got 40 full lengths posts that I wrote and chose not to submit.
In general before I hit "Publish" I ask the question, "Would the world be better with these words in it."
If yes I share it with the 2 people who actually read this.
If no I just hit save now.
Sometimes it comes back as more than half a thing (our current church sermon outline was a blog post about Evan Griffin from 2007), sometimes I can see why I held on to it (a 2 paragraph rant about a dog in a pink sweater), but in general I'm happy I self edited.
I think more people should say less.

Literary Criticism

I read this at lunch:
http://www.slate.com/id/2240341/pagenum/2
It's a commentary about the book A Separate Peace, and it sucks.
What he says is true--A Separate Peace is gayer than we recall but also important because it speaks in a voice that's been lost in our "boy aren't we clever" post modern culture.
But the commentary is terrible because he get's so caught up in style he hardly says anything.
Look, in our Twitter World I'm all for poetry that conveys a truer sense of reality than can be conveyed through bullet points. Sometimes truth needs words. And I'm ok with throwing in elements of style. You should, that's why you learn them.
What I find annoying is trying to stretch a bunt into a homer with clever parallel structure, nifty semantic tricks, and cute inversions. Say something clearly, polish it with style, then find something else interesting.
If you're a writer please stop doing this.