RDP Thursday – CAST-OFF
CAST OFF THIS TATTERED COAT by Stephen Crane
Day: April 4, 2019
Whatever else he may be, Trump at least is not an ostrich – REBLOG – The Shinbone Star
I find it so much easier to let other people say what I’m thinking. It’s a lot less exhausting than writing these things myself. And you know the WORST thing (personally) about all this mess? It has ruined my retirement. It has taken the relaxation and dredged it with dirt and horror stories. After a lifetime of horror stories, I thought I might get a little time off.
I guess not.
Ostriches don’t bury their heads in the sand like Trump often does — they wouldn’t be able to breathe! That exonerates Donald Trump from being an ostrich. Greater flamingos however do. They bury their bills and often their entire heads in wet sand to suck up muddy water looking for bottom feeders they thrive on.
That’s where Trump apparently feeds every day, feasting on the offal left at the bottom of the White House swamp by his Cabinet to fortify his ego. This is important because it helps explain why Trump is up to his ass in alligators and can still pretend that all is well in Mudville.
Monday Mr. Trump tweeted:
“Now that the long awaited Mueller Report conclusions have been released, most Democrats and others have gone back to the pre-Witch Hunt phase of their lives before Collusion Delusion took over. Others are pretending that their former hero…
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NON-VERBAL AND PRESCIENT – Marilyn Armstrong
FOWC with Fandango — Prescient
The definition of the word means “knowing events or information before it is available,” but the word is usually used to mean “having a sense of what is coming.” Like me, having a sick feeling despite all the surveys, Hillary was not going to win. It is also prescient knowing that the little squirrel is hiding in the branch of that tree, waiting for me to stop waiting by the window so he can come back for more black seeds.
We have one young one who is totally hooked on black sunflower seeds and will settle for nothing else. He would be there 24 hours a day if I didn’t occasionally come outside and tell him he really needs to move on.
Prescient is that feeling you get when someone very sick is going to die … you just “feel” it. I’ve often watched my dogs communicate with each other. Without words, they seem to know what the others want — or they are letting them know what’s happening with just a nose-to-nose sniff.
Animals use non-verbal communication constantly. It isn’t prescient … it’s just non-verbal communications that I bet we could use if we wanted to. I suspect we did, too, before we started to chatter all the time. I think we all could, like our dogs, tell each other “things” without words or formal knowledge. We still do it. Couples use “the look” a lot. It’s the look which says “let’s split” or “that guy’s an idiot.” We know the look, we know its meaning. We pick right up on it.
So we are all prescient at some level.
Can I read tomorrow’s news without a newspaper? Sure I can. Trump will do something insulting and evil while everyone acts as if it’s normal. England will still not know what to do about Brexit. Half the world will hate refugees and the other half will be refugees.
Most foreknowledge is solidly based on past knowledge. You know what always happens, so you have no doubts what is about to happen. Is that prescience or experience? Both?
These days, I think our whole world is prescient.
A WHISPER TO CHANGE THE WORLD – Marilyn Armstrong
I was a fervent, probably thoroughly obnoxious student of comparative religion in my final two years of university. It was no doubt the culmination of my search for The Whole Truth. I wanted a key that would unlock the meaning of everything. I’ve written about “The Meaning of Everything.” It is my all-time favorite post, even if it isn’t my best post.
This, however, isn’t about me.
It’s about Mr. Wekerle, pronounced Weh-ker-lee with the emphasis on the first syllable. He was the head of the Philosophy Department at Hofstra University when I was attending.
I adored him. Not because he was “hot,” but because he was so incredibly smart. He was also the only professor could tell when I was bullshitting and hadn’t actually read the books. The only teacher to give me D-/A+ as a grade for a 50-page paper.
The A+ was for style, the D- for content.
Mr. Wekerle — he was ABD having not quite finished that doctoral thesis and I don’t know if he ever did — made me work for my grades. Made me think. Forced me to spell everything out and never assume my reader already knew any of the material. Which, as it turned out, served me very well in the business world.
He read every page of every paper submitted in class. He was harder on me than on other students because he felt I had potential as an academic. I probably did, but life had other plans for me.
One of his best tricks for getting students to listen attentively in class was to whisper. It was what we call a “stage whisper.” Loud enough to be heard at the back of the room if no one talked or rustled papers.
In Wekerle’s classes, no one wanted to sit in the back. You never wanted to miss a single word. Especially not during his annual “Phenomenology” lecture. Students would show up from all over campus to sit in on it, even if they’d heard it half a dozen times over the years.
We would sit there, breathless as he whispered the meaning of everything into the hushed room.
Never underestimate the power of a quiet voice, in words spoken in a whisper. Shouting may get attention, but a whisper can change the world.
The Encyclopedia Britannica provides this definition of phenomenology:
Phenomenology, a philosophical movement originating in the 20th century, the primary objective of which is the direct investigation and description of phenomena as consciously experienced, without theories about their causal explanation and as free as possible from unexamined preconceptions and presuppositions.
BRIGHT YELLOW GOLDFINCH – Marilyn Armstrong
I have a lot of news to convey. So much that I thought I’d just show pictures of the bright yellow Goldfinches that have been hovering around the house. We are surrounded by wildlife apparently lured here by the vast quantity of black sunflower seeds.
The doves nestle into the flat feeder and don’t leave until they are so full they can’t eat one more seed. The finches are out in force, as well as the usual other local scavengers. And there’s a brown bird with a black and white striped wing that appears to be the lady of the White-winged Grosbeak, although they are not common in our part of the woods. They are conifer loving birds.
Our woods is 90% oak trees and whatever fir trees we have are pretty stunted and uninspiring. My guess is that black sunflower seeds have mystical powers and draw creatures of all kinds.
This got me thinking about house insurance. And bears. It has been recommended that if there are bears hanging around, that maybe we’d like to remove the bird feeders. Which made me wonder whether or not our insurance includes destruction by bears. I’m betting not. I could be wrong, but rarely does insurance cover the things on which you need coverage.
Meanwhile today I learned my son does NOT have my heart disease — which means my granddaughter doesn’t have it either — at least not from me. Garry got a “thing” removed from his face and apparently his vast number of hours of lying in the sun have done him no particular harm.
AND my chimney is not falling down. All the bricks I found didn’t fall out of the chimney. They had been tucked under the house to keep our dog Tinker from digging there, so they were just old broken bricks.
Now all I have to worry about is replacing the mailbox, replacing the back door and storm door, and putting a storm door on the front of the house. Phew!
So … bright yellow Goldfinches it is.
A FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE – Marilyn Armstrong
A MERE FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE, BOSS
This is one of the biggest problems with electronic communication. I suppose it’s a problem with any communication that isn’t face-to-face. People probably misunderstood each other’s handwritten letters too.
😀 I believe the 🙂 was invented to convey that what you wrote was not meant negatively 😦 Emojis are just an artistic advancement of the stuff we used to do on the keyboard.
I use emoticons liberally, though they are not English and cannot be considered in any way grammatical. They are also childish, but that’s good because children convey feelings easily. I’m not averse to being childish if it improves communications.
I tend to be brusque. Short. I try to be witty, but it doesn’t always come across that way. My attempts to be “cute” can easily be misread as snide, snippy, and dismissive. So for all of you with whom I attempt electronic communications:
1) If I seem to be snide, snippy, or dismissive, you’ll know it. I’m not so subtle. Really.
2) My wrists hurt and I forget almost everything within 15 seconds. Sometimes I forget what I’m doing while I’m doing it. My typing is getting worse. Of the emerging issues caused by pain in wrists and forgetfulness, most malignant are those missing words. I’m not talking about misspellings. I meant words that aren’t there. At all. Particularly unfortunate when the missing word is “not” — exactly reversing the meaning of a sentence yet appearing as grammatically correct.
SOLUTIONS?
Lacking fonts that clearly express sarcasm or irony — both of which are far better expressed by tone of voice, body language, and facial expressions — maybe we (me) should consider alternate forms. This is difficult since I have always tended to be sarcastic. (I used to be worse, but I’m in recovery.) That kind of wit doesn’t translate well into text. Not yet, anyhow and until it does, I’m considering finding types of humor which are less likely to be misread.
The second solution isn’t a solution but might help. Before you decide you’ve been insulted, dismissed, treated with scorn, or anything like that, check with the comment’s originator. Make sure what you know is what was meant. That it wasn’t a complicated typo or a joke gone wildly wrong.
PARANOIA
It’s easy to read everything as a form of criticism. I’ve seen people slide into this by degrees until they successfully misinterpret everything. You need a degree of toughness to live a virtual life. You also need patience, in the sense of not jumping to conclusions. Finally, you have to remember you are not the center of everyone’s world and when people say something, they are not necessarily targeting you.
One of my many problems with the whiners, complainers, and the “oh woe is me-ers” is they have sunk so deep into their own “issues,” they forget other people have lives and problem of their own. People can be brusque — dismissive — and it hasn’t got anything to do with you. They are responding to something going on in their world.
Usually, you will never know what is or was going on unless they choose to tell you or you directly ask. Because many of us like to keep our private life private. I deal with intimate issues face-to-face and telephone-to-telephone. Even email-to-email. Not on my blog.
PRIVACY IS GOOD
Which brings me to my final point.
Bloggers can easily contact each other privately. If you have a bone to pick with someone — or think you do — try email. Directly. To the individual. Even if your position is righteous and your cause is just, in public is rarely the best place to resolve a dispute. After you’ve publicly insulted or hurt someone, they may refuse to forgive you.
And finally, squabbling about personal stuff online is tacky. Totally teenage, very Facebook, and not classy at all.
