A recent Fark Photoshop contest used an industrial safety poster as its source pic.
Warning! I repeat: Fark Photoshop contest. Not for young eyes or the easily offended.
Pretty much everyone else (with the exception of Yugoboy) riffed on the many illustrative diagrams and their captions, but I was inspired by an exhortative graphic in one corner:
Naturally, I saw Steely Dan.
(BTW, my favorite entry was bugdozer’s.)
Kels, me, and Jen, 21 June 2007.
(Yes, I back-dated this entry. I didn’t use the time machine.)
I took a few photos of the boys on Saturday and put them in a new gallery.
Enjoy.
One of my favorite blogs has reached its end.
EPCOT Central was written by a former (and anonymous) Disney corporate employee who treasured the original vision and mission of EPCOT Center—the theme park, not Walt’s planned-but-never-built City of Tomorrow—and sought to keep that vision in focus and observe how Disney’s changes to the theme park have deviated from that mission through the years, with suggestions on how to restore it.
The author, going by the moniker Epcot82, was clearly a kindred spirit to me. I posted a comment on that final page of his blog, then wrote him an email:
I’ve visited your blog every day since I discovered it, checking for new postings, checking for new comments. You did a great job. Certainly brought plenty of trolls and turkeys out of the woodwork in the comments, but I also feel as if I’ve glimpsed a community among the regular commenters who get the picture. You brought ‘em together.
I do plan to have a great time on October 1 at Epcot. Even if Disney doesn’t celebrate, I will. EPCOT Center deserves it.
He has no plans to take his blog offline, so it’ll still be there for some time. Very much worth reading, if you’re a fan of Epcot.
Thanks again, Epcot82.
Happy birthday, Kels!
Kels, 7 June 2007.
Thinking out loud here: Your brain encourages you to follow habits. Habits are generally a good thing because they enable us to accomplish tasks with minimized mental effort.
When you acquire a bad habit, however, it’s still a habit, and your brain instinctively discourages your not following it. The discouragement comes in the form of a feeling of wrongness, a tension, a sense of being forced (by push or pull) into a course of action—a drive to do what the habit prescribes.
It has just occurred to me that I might better be able to act in non-accordance with unwanted habits if I stop thinking about them in terms of “something to fight” or “something to willfully ignore.” That sort of thought reifies the habit: accords it status as an entity with a will unto itself. (A while back, my good friend Nick described such entities as “evil spirits”—a vivid and, in certain states of mind, useful perspective.)
Instead, I’m realizing that it’s not the habit per se that’s making me feel all wrong for not following it. A habit is just a learned sequence of mental states and actions, a program. The problem, rather, is the habit-reinforcing nature of the brain, akin to hunger or the reproductive drive or any other instinct (or addiction), creating the sensation of wrongness when I’m out of line.
When faced with a habit I wish to overcome, I shall endeavor to recognize the perceived force of that habit as a sensation—not an ontological state of wrongness or real importance—and acknowledge it as a signal from my instincts, like any other sensation or emotion, and then direct my attention to the thing I prefer to be doing.
I decided to give myself the gift of better fitness for my 40th birthday—so, for my 39th birthday, I got a bicycle: a Giant Cypress.
Thanks, Mom!
An inattentive driver hit my Saturn while I was driving to work last week, causing only (but, of course, expensive) cosmetic damage to the car, for which I’ve been going through the insurance rigamarole. The police officer who responded at the scene said the other driver was at fault. The repairs should cost me nothing.
It snowed heavily on the morning of April 16 in the town where I live; it mostly rained elsewhere along my morning commute. I drove to my damage-inspection appointment near Plainsboro and then got within about a mile-and-a-half of the office before encountering an impassable moat surrounding the town. I called my boss, who scolded me for forgetting my swim trunks and sent me back home. (Indeed, the governor had declared a state of emergency, and the roads on the way back were already close to flooding.)
I spent that afternoon making a “detective game” for the kids; I’ll eventually post a video.
Okay, that’ll do for now.
Snow on my birthday is sort of a tradition.
Plainsboro, 5 April 2007.
No complaints if it’s a day early.
It just snowed here in Plainsboro. It’s been sunny—though cold—all day, and suddenly it clouded up and snowed for about five minutes. Now it’s bright and clear again.
Photo to follow, later.
