Paint Licks

 

I’m pleased to announce the release of my first e-book, Paint Licks.

Paint Licks gathers insights by 30 painters, living and dead, into the whys and hows of painting.

Download your free copy now.

Share it with a friend.

And let me know if you enjoy it.

Information Compulsion

Everything you say should be true,
but not everything true should be said.

— Voltaire

The late writer Tom Wolfe believed that everyone suffers from "information compulsion," that everyone is "dying to tell you something you don't know."

Wolfe relied on the compulsion to draw secrets out of the hundreds of people he interviewed during his career, including Ken Kesey, Chuck Yeager, John Glenn, Junior Johnson, Hugh Hefner, Phil Spector, and Leonard Bernstein.

We're taught as kids to be discreet, not to volunteer information or share "family business."

And we learn as young adults the numerous penalties attached to having loose lips, when we see peers chastised, ostracized, marginalized, demoted or fired for compulsive blabbery. 

We even take a formal oath of secrecy whenever we're forced to sign one of those sinister-sounding NDAs.

So why do we so readily cave to "information compulsion" when it comes to social media?

In the past 24 hours alone, I have learned through Facebook:

• Despite her need to, a painter I know cannot sell any of her artwork.
  
  
• Another painter I know has been "blocked" for more than a year.
  
  
• A student in a group I follow is clinically depressed.
  
  
• A publisher I know can't stop grieving over his father's death.
  
  
• An event planner I know can't find a job—or even get an interview.

I'm no Pollyanna. Like everyone else,  I too have my share of irksome troubles.

But sharing them on social media, as if it were one big recovery meeting, makes no sense to me.

Surrendering to information compulsion may reduce your anxiety, but it confers no honor upon you, and is sure to haunt you in the long run.

"The ideal man bears the accidents of life with grace and dignity," Aristotle said, "making the best of circumstances."

You want to be that man (or woman or neither).

Because dignity is non-negotiable.

No Place Like Home?

Considered a social distancing pioneer, Marcel Proust wrote all seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time in his bed.

Move over, Marcel. Americans may have you beat.

According to a new study by lead-gen company CraftJack, 45% of remote workers routinely work from a couch; 38%, in bed; and 20%, outdoors.

CraftJack asked 1,500 Americans who worked from home where in the house they did so.

While some have home offices, most Americans do not—particularly the city-dwellers.

Those unfortunate workers have been forced, since Covid-19 shut down the country in April 2021, to make do with couches, beds and chaise lounges.

Working from home under these conditions is no cakewalk, which could explain employees' poor reaction to Google's announcement yesterday (following Apple's lead) that it has postponed their return to the office to mid-October.

Keep Me Posted

Too much of nothing can make a man feel ill at ease.

— Bob Dylan

"Keep me posted."

The idiom is thought by some linguists to derive from the Old English word postis, borrowed from Latin and meaning "doorpost."

As did many ancients, the Romans believed evil spirits lurked about their doors. To ward them off, they'd nail amulets to their postes and slather them with potions—combinations of things like salt, cumin, chewed buckthorn, and monkey urine. They'd also nail a variety of "danger" and "no trespassing" signs to their doorposts, meant to deter the devils.

In the Middle Ages, wooden posts were erected in village squares, meant for the display of public notices, and postis in Middle English came to mean "to announce," as when a couple would "post banns" before their wedding. This practice is the more likely source of the modern idiom "Keep me posted." (The later-arriving expression "posting a letter" is unrelated; it derives from the French noun poste, which means "courier.")

Today, social media is our postis, the way we all—except for a few Luddites—spread and follow news.

But when is too much posting too much? When does posting become spamming?

The social media mavens at Hootsuite have the answers:

• On Instagram, you should post no more than once a day (either a feed-post or a story). Posting daily will double your following every week. Posting more frequently is spamming.

• On Facebook, you should post no more than twice a day. Posting at that frequency will quadruple your following; but posting more than that will cost you followers.
  
  
• On Twitter, you should post no more than six times a day. One-third of your posts should comprise self-promotion; one-third, stories; one-third, insights.
  
  
• On LinkedIn, you should post no more than five times a day. However, having been banned for life from LinkedIn (for opposition to gun ownership), I urge you to boycott this nest of right-wing vipers and post zero times a day. Better yet, delete your LinkedIn account.

All Hootsuite's rules of course take a back seat to the prime directive: your content should add value. Posting crap, even once, is over-posting.

Adding value—when you consider all the clutter—is a feat. 

Adding value is something. 

Adding crap is nothing.

Too much of nothing can make a man feel ill at ease.

First, Entertain

It’s a very recent thing that there’s a premium put on
making writing so difficult that only a charmed
aristocracy is capable of understanding it.

— Tom Wolfe

Besides brevity, what improves writing?

The aim to entertain.

When I was a college student, my professors would assign a mountain of papers to write—as many as one every week.

The papers were a serious matter, their grades representing two-thirds or more of the final grade for each class.

I decided early on that if I wasn't entertained by my paper, the professor surely wouldn't be; so I sought a quirky angle for nearly every one.

While I remember few of these papers today, one from a Theology course sticks in my mind. 

The assignment was to react to some book we had to read about the divinity of Christ. 

I wrote my paper all in dialog, from the viewpoint of a subject on a psychiatrist's couch. I swiped that gimmick from Philip Roth, who used it throughout Portnoy's Complaint.

The Theology professor commented that, although I had "underestimated Christ's divine nature," the paper was "entertaining." 

I received an A+.

The effort to enchant my professors worked like a charm for the most part, enabling me to ace papers on topics like Beowulf, Blake, Tolstoy, Bismarck, Hegel, epistemology, subcultures, collectives, and Muscovite hegemony in Yugoslavia.

It didn't quite work out with a paper on protein-deficient neurotransmitters.

The most frequent comment the professors offered was "shallowly thought out, but entertaining."

Aiming to entertain also provided a stimulant (along with coffee), helping me plow quickly through otherwise tedious material. 

That gave me more time to spend on my primary interest: coeds.

There was nothing original about my effort. 

Writers, if not undergrads, have been acting as entertainers since the Bronze Age.

Shakespeare, by injecting prankish novelties into his plays, upped their quotient of "fun" measurably. That effort paid him well at the box office. 

And the late best-selling novelist Tom Wolfe codified the writer's role as entertainer, telling editor Tom Freeman in 2004 that he wanted to make all writers swear to be entertaining.

"I’ve begun working on a writers’ Hippocratic oath,” Wolfe told Freeman. 

"The first line of the doctors’ Hippocratic oath is 'First, do no harm.' And I think for the writers it would be: 'First, entertain.'

"Entertain is a very simple word. I looked it up in the dictionary. Entertainment enables people to pass the time pleasantly. And any writing—I don’t care if it’s poetry or what—should first entertain."

But how would Wolfe's dictum apply, say, in business, where the writer's oath is more like, "First, inform."

You might lean on something your audience doesn't expect.

Here, for example, is an email I just received, in its entirety:

Your business is important to us. It's our mission to keep you up-to-date on what's happening with business in the Delaware region and how it affects you. But we need your help to fulfill that mission.

Right now, you're receiving our email newsletters, but you don't have access to our best resources and Insider-only content.

I've got great news.

Now through July 29, you can become a full Delaware Business Times Insider for only $4 per month. This is 50% off our normal rate and is our best rate of the year. As an Insider you'll get all 24 issues per year of Delaware Business Times (digitally or in print), immediate access to all of the Insider-only content on our website, priority registration for all DBT and Delaware Today virtual events and discounted registration for all DBT and Delaware Today in-person events.

Becoming a DBT Insider is a valuable investment for your own business and a strong investment in local business journalism right here in Delaware.

Here's the same email with the fun quotient upped by leaning on, of all things, a pharma commercial:

Physicians agree: there's one thing worse than FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). FOMB (Fear of Missing a Bargain).

Now you can cure both with one easy action.

Through July 29, become a full Delaware Business Times Insider for only $4 per month—half off the normal rate. By subscribing, you'll receive all 24 issues of Delaware Business Times (digitally or in print), access to Insider-only content on our website, priority registration for all DBT and Delaware Today virtual events, and discounted registration for all DBT and Delaware Today in-person events.

You'll never miss an important business story—or the year's biggest bargain—again!

The Business End of Your Pencil

One day when I was studying with Schoenberg,
he pointed out the eraser on his pencil and said,
"This end is more important than the other."

— John Cage

It's one thing to praise brevity, another to achieve it. Brevity begins and ends with "chunks."

The basic chunk is the paragraph. 

Think of the paragraph as a form of punctuation. Just as sentences would be hard to read without commas, colons, and periods, writing would be hard to read without paragraphs.

As a rule, short paragraphs (like this one) are effective.

However, while writing short paragraphs can be a virtue, paragraphs need not be short to seem brief. They simply have to follow a proven, four-part formula:

1. First, get your thoughts down, even if they take the form a single paragraph.

2. Next, "chunk" your separate thoughts into separate paragraphs.

3. Then, polish your paragraphs:

• Make sure your topic sentence—establishing the main point of the paragraph—is up front.
  
  
• Make sure the topic sentence transitions from the prior paragraph. That means it begins with something familiar to your reader, namely, the idea last expressed at the end of the previous paragraph. 
  
  
• Shape the entirety of your paragraph so it progresses cohesively and coherently. Your sentences should flow one from another (that makes them cohesive) and at the same time link to a single topic—the one captured in your topic sentence (that makes them coherent). Whenever your sentences don't link readily to the main topic, introduce bullets or numbers, or simply begin a new paragraph. And don't bother writing a "summation" or "conclusion" at the end of your paragraph. Just leap to the next one.

4. Lastly, apply the business end of your pencil and revise. As you're doing so, be sure to express all your ideas with precision and to cut your words by a third, at least.

“Writing is revision,” as Tracy Kidder says.

Here's an example of a paltry paragraph—lacking a topic sentence, lacking cohesiveness, lacking coherence, lacking precision. It's short, but godawful:

London's weather had been unusual for September, so Londoners took advantage of it to linger in the parks and visit the popular department stores. Even though an occasional air-raid siren would sound, the barrage balloons that flew overhead provided them a sense of security. They also attended plays and went to "picture shows," seeing films like Rebecca, The Thin Man and Gaslight. Considering England was at war, Londoners on the whole were quite complacent.

Here's the same content in the hands of Erik Larson, a writer who knows the business end of a pencil (the passage is from his new best-seller The Splendid and the Vile):

The day was warm and still, the sky blue above a rising haze. Temperatures by afternoon were in the nineties, odd for London. People thronged Hyde Park and lounged on chairs set out beside the Serpentine. Shoppers jammed the stores of Oxford Street and Piccadilly. The giant barrage balloons overhead cast lumbering shadows on the streets below. After the August air raid when bombs first fell on London proper, the city had retreated back into a dream of invulnerability, punctuated now and then by false alerts whose once-terrifying novelty was muted by the failure of bombers to appear. The late-summer heat imparted an air of languid complacency. In the city’s West End, theaters hosted twenty-four productions, among them the play Rebecca, adapted for the stage by Daphne du Maurier from her novel of the same name. Alfred Hitchcock’s movie version, starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, was also playing in London, as were the films The Thin Man and the long-running Gaslight.

Tighten Your Spigot

Be silent for the most part; or say only

what is necessary and in few words.

― Epictetus

A phone call with a salesman this week reminded me why I dislike so many salespeople.

He would not shut up.

What should have been a 10-minute call wound up an hour-long harangue.

Citing the "Golden Ratio," sales coaches advise you to "talk less, listen more." The ratio of talk should be 3:2 in favor of the customer.  

But this guy isn't buying it.

And I may not buy what he's selling—simply because I can't take another drenching.

Worse, he followed the call up with a 600-word email (not including his two attachments). I've yet to read it all.

If only he knew about Star Style.

Ernest Hemingway mastered Star Style in 1917 during a seven-month apprenticeship at The Kansas City Star. It would propel the writer to fame only nine years later.

In a 1940 interview, Hemingway recalled how the paper's city editor taught him to write by demanding adherence to 110 rules. "Those were the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing,'' Hemingway said. 

Foremost among them were three: Use short sentences. Use vigorous English. Eliminate every superfluous word.

Hemingway revered The Star's rules. "I've never forgotten them. No man with any talent can fail to write well if he abides by them."

Hemingway added to the rules one of his own, which in Death on the Afternoon he labeled the "Iceberg Theory."

"The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water," he wrote. 

"If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them."

The Greek Stoic Epictetus, 2,000 years before had urged followers to abide by comparable rules for speaking.

"Be silent for the most part; or say only what is necessary and in few words," Epictetus advised.

"Talk, but rarely, if occasion calls, and never about ordinary things—gladiators or horse races or athletes or feasts; these are vulgar topics; but above all not about men in blame or compliment or comparison. Turn the conversation, if you can, by talking about fitting subjects; but, should you be among strangers, be silent."

If you're prone to saying too much—in person or on paper—consider your audience. Show them some charity. Tighten your spigot. 

Maybe the Golden Ratio should be 9:1 in favor of the customer.

Maybe the gold in the Golden Rule is—silence.

When I'm Sixty-ur

It's 64 AD and the Stoic philosopher Seneca, by coincidence, is 64. 

He's been retired from his job as Nero's chief of staff two full years now, and has time on his hands. 

He likes to sit by the waterside near his villa outside Rome and people-watch.

Seneca sees the sail of an incoming mailboat one day, and studies the sudden stirring of the "rabble" on the docks.

"While everybody was bustling and hurrying to the waterfront," he writes to his friend Lucilius, "I felt great pleasure in my laziness, because, although I was soon to receive letters from my friends, I was in no hurry to know how affairs were progressing abroad."

Seneca's bemusement stems from the thought that he has "more travelling-money than journey;" in other words, that he won't outlive the wealth he's accumulated, because his remaining life will likely be short.

He can travel as much as he wants—or not at all.

A journey is frustrating, he tells Lucilius, if you quit half way before reaching your destination; but, as a metaphor for life, a journey need not be completed to be rewarding. 

"Life is not incomplete if it is honorable," Seneca writes. 

"At whatever point you leave off living, provided you leave off nobly, your life is a whole."

Leaving "nobly," Seneca says, is leaving "bravely" and "resolutely;" "gliding from life," no matter the reasons. 

Those reasons—the reasons for your death—"need not be momentous," he says; "for neither are the reasons momentous which hold us here."

The rabble on the docks awaiting the news amuses Seneca, because it never stops to ask, what bearing does the news have on the journey?

Why should I care that Jeff Bezos will blast into space? That Britney Spears refuses to tour? That the Queen remains disappointed with Meghan Markle? That Trump now hates McConnell?

Like Seneca, I'm in no hurry to know how affairs are progressing abroad. 

So please don't ping me, text me, tweet me, or IM me.

I hit yet another sexagenarian birthday yesterday and, in Stoic fashion, am content just to sit and watch the rabble rush to the mailboat.

If you have news to share, please, as the expression goes, tell me something I don't know.

How to leave here nobly would be a great start.

NOTE: You can read Seneca's whole letter to Lucilius here. 

In Your Face

Retailers have found a new way too get in shoppers' faces: facial recognition.

Macy's, Lowe's, Ace and Apple are among the retailers identifying shoppers' faces, Axios reports.

The sannning technology lets them catch chronic shoplifters.

More than three dozen advocacy groups want to ban it.

Good luck with that.

Retailers could use facial recognition technology to "personalize" shopping.

They could use it, for example, to push digital coupons to shoppers as they enter a store; improve the merchandise displays based on foot traffic; and streamline shopping (China's Alibaba assigns robots to follow loyal shoppers around, performing the role of "automated shopping carts").

But US retailers don't; they use it for store security.

Axios says they'll soon introduce other "biometric" technology in stores.

One interprets facial expressions; another detects sweat; and another senses an elevated heart rate.

Retailers will know not only that you have shoplifted, but that you're about to do so again.

Taken for Granted

I don't want politicians deciding what's exciting in my life.

— David Hockney

Last year I was elected to the board of directors of our HOA by the residents of our development.

Although a thankless job, my involvement has taught me something fundamental about people.

No one wants her needs taken for granted.

That fact, I now see, forms the eye of our nation's political storm.

I've been trying for nine months, along with the other board members, to advise a group of 20 neighbors about the peril their homes face.

A commercial developer is about to build a nursing home uphill of them that will cause their properties to flood during rainstorms.

They don't care.

Not a single one of them has responded to the board's many recommendations for a course of action, nor even acknowledged the repeated emails and letters we have sent them.

They don't care.

We have been reading them wrongly.

We've been assuming flooded yards and basements would represent an inconvenience; and that they ought to worry their homes' sale prices will fall.

They don't care.

I see clearly, as a result, the dilemma every politician creates for herself by taking others' needs for granted.

As board members, our duties (which stem from state law) include the "duty of care," which means we must do our homework and make prudent decisions.

We try always to do so.

Where we went wrong in this case was to neglect to ask the 20 homeowners affected if they cared their homes will flood.

They don't care.

Imagine how peaceful the public forum would be if the politicians from both parties ceased taking our needs for granted.

Imaging if they quit deciding for us what concerns us; what we care about and need.

Imagine if they asked every constituent:

Do you need oil wells and coal mines?

Do you need to carry a gun? 

Do you need your own bathroom? 

Do you need to protect kids from 1619?

Do you need to shelter Jeff Bezos' taxable income? 

Do you need to incarcerate every criminal?

Do you need to turn back every immigrant?

Do you need to deny an abortion to a woman you'll never meet?

Do you need to guarantee that food costs less in Cuba, that Palestinians can find jobs, or that Afghanis can read Teen Vogue?

Do you need the federal budget balanced?

Just imagine if the politicians asked us those questions.

They'd find out, like the owners of the 20 homes in my HOA, we don't care. We have totally other needs.

What a wonderful world this would be.

The Nero Decree

We may be destroyed, but if we are, we shall drag a world with us.

— Adolf Hitler

While retreating from the Soviet Union in 1944, the Nazis used Schwellenpflüge ("rail rippers") to destroy Russia's railroads.

The Schwellenpflug (literally "crosstie plow") was a railcar that dragged an immense hook behind it.

The hook splintered the crossties under the rails, leaving the railway useless.

Officially named the Krupp C24, thousands of Schwellenpflüge were deployed by Germany to enemy nations throughout the war.

Sowing destruction was not a military tactic, but a scorched-earth policy known among Hitler's inner circle as the "Nero Decree."

“Our nation’s struggle for existence forces us to use all means to inflict lasting damage on the striking power of the enemy,” Hitler wrote in the decree.

The Nero Decree was the product of a fanatic whose ruthless Darwinism knew no bounds.

Today, another fanatical Darwinist, Trump, has his own Nero Decree.

It mandates the deaths of thousands of Republicans—Republicans too weak to overthrow the federal government. 

His Schwellenpflug isn't a railcar, but a microbe we call Covid-19. 

It, too, has hooks.

They rip through Republicans like a red-hot knife slices butter.

Since January 6, tens of thousands have died.

Many more will die in the coming months. 

But what of it? 

To Trump, they're just "losers" who are "actually made of garbage."

The line between between sanity and madness, like the line between victory and defeat, is thin.

POSTCRIPT: In Landslide, journalist Michael Wolff describes Trump's contempt for his followers: “Trump often expressed puzzlement over who these people were, their low-rent 'trailer camp' bearing and their 'get-ups,' once joking that he should have invested in a chain of tattoo parlors and shaking his head about 'the great unwashed.'" Like Hitler's, Trump's Darwinism debases everyone outside his family circle—even his most ardent followers.

Character Defects

 Perhaps you are right, Watson. I suppose that its influence is physically a bad one.

— Arthur Conan Doyle

The Wall Street Journal reports that drug overdose deaths rose nearly 30% last year. 

A record 93,300 deaths occurred.

Most were due to abuse of fentanyl, the illegal opioid said to be 50 times more stimulating than heroin.

Sherlock Holmes would alarm Dr. Watson by injecting a mere seven percent solution of cocaine. 

Imagine if he'd had access to fentanyl.

Public health officials blame last year's deaths on the hardship, dislocation, and isolation brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic.

I don't buy what the officials are peddling.

Addiction is due to character defects.

Well-meaning doctors insist otherwise, but a naïve ignorance of life explains their mistake.

They spend too much time chumming with colleagues, too little with addicts.

Dr. Watson knew better. He spent countless hours with an addict.

Watson would often scold Holmes for using a narcotic the detective called "transcendently stimulating."

"Your brain may be roused and excited," Watson would say, "but it is a pathological and morbid process. You know what a black reaction comes upon you."

Watson understood it was Holmes' raging egotism that drove him to shoot up. 

I've met enough people in recovery to know addicts' dependence stems from the drive to paper over character defects like pride, shame, hate, cowardice, and laziness.

Covid-19 didn't kill the 93,300 Americans who overdosed last year.

Neither did fentanyl.

Unresolved character defects did.

Above: Victorian syringe kit.

Birds Sing from the Heart, Revisited

Five years ago this week, author Erik Deckers invited me to guest-post on his blog. "Birds Sing from the Heart" was the result, one that still holds up years later. Here it is in its entirety.

Erik recently invited me to discuss “My Writing Process,” a dead-horse topic if there ever were one.

But I’ll beat that horse anyway, just because Erik asked.

Here you go:

Where I find ideas. The wellsprings of ideas are many and inexhaustible. The ones I return to again and again are:

• Other writers—from the sublime (e.g., Emerson, Faulkner, Sartre, Updike) to the ridiculous (names withheld)
  
• Pop culture (songs, movies, TV shows, blogs, etc.)
  
• Current events (AKA La Comédie humaine)
  
• Memories, dreams, reflections
  
• Other people’s observations (my wife’s, in particular)

How I write the ideas down. My secret sauce is no secret. Writing isn’t thinking. It isn’t even writing. “Writing is revision,” as Tracy Kidder says. “Write once, edit five times,” David Ogilvy urged office mates.” Priceless advice. Your fifth draft may not excel, but it will beat your first by a long shot. And, as you edit five times, be like the birds. An ornithologist mentioned during a recent NPR interview that birds’ voice boxes are lodged deep within their chests. “Birds sing from the heart,” she said. You should, too. Readers like it and will respond accordingly.

How I assure quality. Copy’s never error free, but I try hard to check my facts. In fact, I often spend more time fact-checking sources than writing and editing. (Don’t hem and haw: fact-checking is enlightening.) And I proofread, both twice before I hit publish and twice afterwards. Boring task, but my reputation’s on the line.

How I spread ideas. Outposting has helped aggrandize my scribblings more than any of my other activities. Adman Gary Slack advises clients to invest in “other people’s audiences” more than their own. He’s 100% on the money.

For more advice about writing. If you’re hungry for sound advice, listen to Paul Simon and Chuck Close discuss the creative process in a podcast for The Atlantic. You’ll learn more than you will by reading 50 how-to books, with these four noteworthy exceptions:

• The Art and Craft of Feature Writing by William E. Blunder
• On the Art of Writing Copy by Herschel Gordon Lewis
• Secrets of a Freelance Writer by Bob Bly
• Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark

Oh yeah, don’t forget No Bullshit Social Media.

Above: Little Bird by Jose Trujillo. Oil on canvas. 14 x 14 inches.

Bounce

Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.

— Omar Khayyam

Americans are happier than ever, according to Gallup.

In fact, 6 of 10 (59%) are "thriving," the pollster says—a record number since it launched the National Health and Wellbeing Index in 2008.

That number is up nearly 13 points since the appearance of Covid-19 last year, when the number of happy Americans plunged to 46% (tying the record low, reached during the Great Recession).

Gallup divvies Americans into three buckets it calls "thriving," "struggling" and "suffering." 

"Thriving" Americans rate their lives 7 or higher on a 10-point scale. Over 59% currently do so.

Not that you'd know it from news coverage and social media, but only 38% of Americans currently are "struggling;" and only 3%, "suffering."

That's far too many in my book; but, still, it's a minority. 

Gallup also measures worry.

Worry gripped 6 of 10 Americans during the pandemic.

It grips many fewer now—only 4 in 10.

Instead, most Americans—7 in 10—are enjoying their lives every day.

Less than 3 in 10 are ever bored.

Gallup claims the bounce is due to the availability of the Covid-19 vaccine, the reopening of in-person events, and the recovery of the economy.

I would add to those causes last November's exorcism of the incubus Trump. No doubt about it. Ding dong.

Although, as Gallup warns, the Delta variant of Covid-19 could again crimp our happiness, it's clear, altogether, we're a pretty happy bunch, even if we don't deserve our happiness.

"What is happiness?" Friedrich Nietzsche asked. 

"The feeling that power increases—that resistance is overcome."

So if you're feeling blue, get with the program: feel the power.

And put on a happy face.

NOTE: Be sure to click the embedded links above. They're guaranteed to make you happy.

Lest We Forget

If America forgets where she came from, then will begin the rot and dissolution.

— Carl Sandburg

Covid-19 has killed 625,000 Americans.

Yet Trump, the ever-impertinent troglodyte, asks, “Have you noticed that they are now admitting I was right about everything?”

Right about Covid-19? Really?

Ebola, lest we forget, killed two Americans. 

Two.

Obama, lest we forget, dealt with Ebola with dispatch. (Ebola, lest we forget, is the virus that, before it kills you, makes you bleed from the eyes, ears, and nose, as you feverishly vomit and shit and cough up blood.)

Obama eschewed willful ignorance and heeded the science.

Obama strategized, asking doctors to guide his decisions. 

Obama activated the CDC and DOD, deploying men and materiel to West Africa to halt the spread of Ebola "at its source."

Obama built frontline hospitals; trained West African healthcare workers (25,000 of them); initiated contact tracing; and buried victims' bodies. 

“Here’s the bottom line,” he said in October 2014. “The best way to stop this disease, the best way to keep Americans safe, is to stop it at its source—in West Africa.”

Two years after the first case was discovered there, the outbreak was halted.

But not without costs.

Eleven people were treated for Ebola in the US during the epidemic, most of them doctors who deployed to West Africa. They flew back to the US for treatment. Two of the eleven died.

Two.

Not 625,000; two.

Trump tweeted at the time, "If this doctor, who so recklessly flew into New York from West Africa, has Ebola, then Obama should apologize to the American people and resign!"

And last May, Trump called Obama "an incompetent president—grossly incompetent."

Trump, incompetence incarnate—and the GOP's likely presidential candidate in three years.

GOP, you stand for amnesia, and for rot and dissolution.

I'll take leadership, any day.

“We are the United States of Amnesia," Gore Vidal once said. "We learn nothing because we remember nothing.”

Scuttlebutt

Scuttlebutt is the only thing free in the modern era.

— Ugwu Kelvin

Before there was water-cooler talk, there was scuttlebutt.

An 18th-century nautical term, a scuttlebutt was a cask of drinking water kept on deck for the crew.

Scuttlebutts had a gaping hole, so sailors could dip a cup into them. They would often gather around the ship's scuttlebutt to gossip.

The word compounded scuttle, meaning a "hole in a ship," and butt, meaning a "barrel."

Scuttle was a 15th-century term derived from the Spanish escotilla, meaning "hatch."

In battle, when a captain preferred to sink rather than surrender his vessel, he would order sailors to "scuttle the ship" by cutting holes in the hull.

The nautical term bore no relationship to the inland scuttle, meaning "dish," "cup," or "bucket." The inland word was a 14th-century borrowing from the Latin scutella, meaning "platter."

By the 19th century, shipboard rumors came to be known collectively as scuttlebutt, the maritime version of fake news—the lies rival newspaper publishers accused each other of printing in the 19th century.   

Inland rumors, on the other hand, when they didn't appear in newspapers were spread through the grapevine in the 19th century. In America, at least.

No sooner than Samuel Morse invented the telegraph (1844) did a company named Western Union string thousands upon thousands of miles of telegraph wire across the country. 

Americans thought the company's labyrinthine handiwork resembled a grapevine, and telegraph messages were said to arrive "through the grapevine."

During the Civil War, when a soldier wanted to vouch for a suspect rumor, he'd say, "I heard it through the grapevine," meaning "it must be true." 

Rumors themselves soon came to be known collectively as grapevine (or what the British would call humbug).

Now that you've heard them, be sure to share these facts with colleagues—on line or at the water cooler.

Flailing About

Johnson has been flailing about desperately.

— New York Magazine

The cognitive dissonance Republican Senator Ron Johnson suffers would pain an intelligent man, according to New York Magazine. Nonetheless, Johnson must wonder how he can call the louts who assaulted the Capitol on January 6 "tourists."

"Johnson has been flailing about desperately in search of a resolution to this contradiction," the magazine says.

The verb flail, meaning to "whip," is an 11th-century word that originally meant to "thresh" or "winnow." 

Knight wielding a "flail"

A flail was a Mediaeval farm tool made of wood and leather. Its name was borrowed from the Latin name for the same tool, flagellum, from which we also get the verb flagellate, meaning to "flog."

When we see a flail today, we think of knights doing battle, but the flail was never a weapon. 

Mediaeval artists merely convinced us it was.

By depicting flail-wielding knights in illuminated manuscripts, medieval artists led later viewers to imagine that these wily cavalrymen must have used flails to terrorize foes. 

But, the "flails" wielded by knights were actually goads—wood-and-rope cattle prods that somewhat resemble flails. Knights used goads to prod their horses.

Medieval flail

The spiked iron "flails" in museum collections today are in fact simulacra: 19-century copies of a 10-century weapon that never existed.

So when you read that Johnson is "flailing about," don't think of knights of old. 

To flail about means to "whip around," to "engage in erratic movements."