September, 2006
51 posts under this date.
And I am, because it really, really, really is true: YouTube’s lonelygirl15 is the birth of a new art form.
How Gibsonian (or Laughing-man-esque) the whole video-cult esoterica was, don’t you think? (Though no one would have predicted that we would become obsessed with a (fictional) chirpy teen.) Danah boyd has some interesting things to say and the New York Time’s article on the memebomb is outstanding (but would some link love really kill them?).
“Roughly speaking, the thing we need a name for is a multi-use, customizable, instantly recognizable, time-worn, quoted or misquoted phrase or sentence that can be used in an entirely open array of different jokey variants by lazy journalists and writers.”
X is the new Y.
Original X: “pink”; original Y: “black”; commonly attributed to Gloria Vanderbilt (original 1960s, popularized 1980s)
X. Y X.
Original X: “Bond”; Y: “James”; from the film Dr. No (1962) and all subsequent James Bond movies.
Dammit, Jim! I’m a X, not a Y!
Original X: “doctor”, original Y: “magician”; from a famous misquotation of a line from Star Trek. (c. 1966)
If Eskimos have N words for snow, X surely have Y words for Z.[1]
See Eskimo words for snow WP.
, M dollars. Y, N dollars. Z? Priceless.
Strapline from MasterCard advertising campaign (2000)
Glenn Whitman finally dubbed the linguistic artifact a snowcloneWP (at 22:56:57 on Thursday, January 15, 2004, in Northridge, California, btw) and the meme just bit me. It just bit you.
There’s an old story about two men on a train. One of
them, seeing some naked-looking sheep in a field, said,
“Those sheep have just been sheared.’; The other looked
a moment longer, and then said, “They seem to be—
on this side.” It is in such a cautious spirit that we
should say whatever we have to say about the workings
of the mind.
John Holt, How Children LearnWP
And since we’re at it, I might as well show off my other train-and-grazing-animals-through-the-window joke:
Two Englishmen are going by train. A conversation isn’t getting on. The train passes a meadow, on which a herd of sheeps pastures. One of the passengers says:
—1356.
The other man is surprised, but gives no answer. In some time the train passes another pasture. The first passenger says:
—1693.
His neighbor brakes and asks:
—Sir, our train moves at speed 60 miles per hour. How can you count so quickly?
—Oh, sir, it’s very simple! First I count a quantity of legs in a herd and then I divide this number by four.
...a delicious dinner makes.
That’s an example of the questions Ellen J. Langer, as she recounts in MindfulnessAM, p167-170, posed to a group of elementary school kids in a study on discrimination. I’ve been rattling my brain for good answers since: Why?
No satisfactory answers have been found but here are some stabs at it, in markedly decreasing order of quality:
Above-average manual dexterity
Since most of the deaf speak sign language WP and since sign language relies heavily on hands as the primary vehicle of expression, it is likely that the deaf develop above-average manual dexterity, which would sure come handy in many cooking tasks (say, chopping or cutting).
Since they have one less sense to distract them, they can focus more on flavors. The blind are known to have very refined senses of hearing and smelling, perhaps something similar happens to the deaf?
No stress in noisy environments
Kitchens can be pretty hectic environments, right?
Clear, quick note-writing (and reading)
It is likely that they have had to rely many times on writing clear, quick notes to strangers so they might have developed systems or experience for making them easily understood. That may come in handy in busy kitchens were a lot of information is passed on written notes (so that, say, orders don’t get all mixed up).
Different food cues
They may have discovered different cues for food quality or meal readiness (say, since they can’t hear milk burbling, they might smell when milk is just about to boil over).
Sign language is a noiseless language
So it might be better at restaurants where absolutely no noise is desired from the kitchen. (On the other hand, perhaps it’s hard for a deaf person to accurately assess just how much noise they inadvertently make with cooking instruments.)
More accurate people-reading
A deaf may have learned to rely more on other people’s body language and thus may be more accurate gauging whether people honestly liked her dishes or not.
Any thoughts?
Time is turning yet again: a beloved CIMAT teacher just send me one more of his one-every-24-months email, my 2nd out-of-school anniversary is around the corner (September 14), and today I found, via Joel1, that Rails just celebrated its second anniversary itself (yup, we were born to the web around the same date).
Let’s share a brief moment of guilty pleasure for proving them wrong, then move on to the longer lasting pleasure of simply sticking to it for our own sake. And have understanding for those conditioned by past disappointments to classify all that is new and ripe with passion to be uninteresting, to be all hype, no calories.
We’re past the point of infatuation, this is love, and love is inclusive. Happy birthday Rails, happy birthday Railers.
Speaking of human possibilitiesELZR, I have found my personal slogan. No need to be jelous of Andrea’sELZR anymore.
In a book aptly called New Bottles for New Wine, Julian Huxley WP quotes his grandfather, the great nineteenth-century scientist Thomas Huxley WP, on the subject of belief: ”Everyone should be able to give a reason for the faith that is in him. My faith is in human possibilities.”
Ellen J. Langer, MindfulnessAM, p195
Ellen J. Langer’s Mindfulness was a personal landmark: a wondrous book on human possibilities, their promise, and their everyday annihilation. I’ve already sprinkled several quotes from it in previous postsELZR (and will continue to do so) but there is one quote that deserves all the highlighting I can give it—this may rank as the most provocative thing I’ve ever read:
Teaching can be done in a much more conditional way.. Children are usually taught “this is a pen,” “this is a rose,” “this is a car.” It is assumed that the pen must be recognized as a pen so that a person can get on with the business of writing. It is also considered useful for the child to form the category “pen.” But consider an alternative: What happens if we instruct the child that “this could be a pen”? This conditional statement, simple as it seems, is a radical departure from telling the child “this is a pen.” What if a number of ordinary household objects were introduced to a child in a conditional way: “This could be a screwdriver, a fork, a sheet, a magnifying glass”? Would that child be more fit for survival on a desert island (when the fork and screwdriver could double as tent pegs for the sheet, near a fire made by the magnifying glass)? Or imagine the impact of a divorce on a child initially taught “a family’ is, a mother, a father, and a child” versus “a family could be…”
Ellen J. Langer, MindfulnessAM, p124
To the jaded eye, most of the paragraph can be easily dismissed as an extravagant, pie-in-the-sky rambling, and I dismissed it so when I first read it—so what if kiddos would make better Robinson CrusoesWP? Should we realign our education for that?—but then the last lightning sentence comes and in its flash we glimpse the world that could be. Do you see?
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