Used to be endorphins. I used to commute by bike. Sometimes riding along the Truckee River Bike Path, sometimes spinning a 35 minute commute that took me through a nice urban park with nearly a mile of dirt trail. Even with the frustration of motorists getting too close, cutting you off, yelling out the window, a bike commute is inherently less stressful than a car commute because of the endorphins expressed during exercise. At least it is for me.

That was three years ago. My life is different now. I still ride a lot, but my commute involves a car, sometimes a dog, my son and a stop at daycare.

It can be stressful and frustrating being self employed. Deadlines are a bit more important when you’re the only one responsible. Days that stack up with more work than you think is possible are as overwhelming as days with nothing on your calendar and nothing to bill. Forgetting my computer cable can cost me an hour of my own time. But when I drop Bowie off at Daycare and spend just a few minutes playing with him and the other kids, my mood instantly improves.

The Drug

Paul Zak’s Ted Talk, Trust, Morality and Oxytocin, starts of talking about morality, then trust, then gets into love and hapiness. He uses the body’s production of the chemical oxytocin as a proxy for measuring our ability to trust, bond with other people and treat each other better (be moral). He’s another guy who has spent a lot of time and energy and money learning something my mom knew a long time ago.

Zak conducted experiments that measured subjects oxytocin levels as they performed trust experiments and found that people with higher oxytocin were more likely to be more trusting, altruistic and moral. He also figured out how to trigger production of oxytocin in the body.

In the talk he tells about two experiments that illuminated the role of oxytocin in everyday life. First he tested the participants in a wedding. The oxytocin levels of the weeding party were pegged to their role in the ceremony with the bride at the center with the highest levels. Second, he predicted that a male subject tested while interacting on facebook attained an extremely high oxytocin level by chatting with his girlfriend.

He concludes the talk by telling the audience that manipulating your oxytocin level, and in turn your trust, altruism and morality is easy. Close physical contact, even when we know the expected outcome, can trigger oxytocin, make us feel good, and improve our mood.

Everyone gets a bounce

At the end of his talk Zak prescribes 8 hugs a day to increase your oxytocin.

We have found that people who release more oxytocin are happier. And they’re happier because they have better relationships of all types. 8 hugs a day: You’ll be happier and the world will be a better place. [Watch the TED video]

When I walk in the door at daycare things get a little loud. I’m that guy. There are three little girls, from 1 to 3 and three little boys, a 10 month old and my son and his cousin, 22 months. And they all get a bounce. The bounce is easy and I’ve trained them now, they hold my hands and get three swinging bounces, as high as I can without hitting the ceiling fan or another kid. The little kids get a hug-bounce so I don’t gank their arms.

That’s it. One catch: before they get a bounce, I get a hug. Strictly quid pro quo. Some adrenalin for them, some oxytocin for me and a much hapier Wolfy for the rest of the world.

-M

It really wanted to be able to post this over there, but it just doesn’t fit. First, there’s some Eff Bombs. Second they’re trespassing. But it is really interesting. So do give it a look:

-Mike

Not sure why. And by reality I don’t mean actual reality. The Real world. The one that fills your nostrils with fridged air. The one that cuts your skin and makes the blood flow out. The kind where light fills the sky and your heart quickens as you make an exposure, write something down or just form a memory.That is just fine. I mean the kind on TV.

I just finished reading City of Thieves by David Benioff and thought it was a really great book. It’s about a real life story that took place in Russia during the Siege of Leningrad. (New York Times Book Review of City of Thieves.)

From 1941 to 1943 the Germans Isolated Leningrad bombarding it, killing more than one million Russian army soldiers and one million civilians. It was brutal. There were shortages of materials and supplies. Citizens of Leningrad had to survive not only privation, but extreme weather and temperatures which got as low as -30 degrees. There was cannibalism, teenage snipers and apartment bombings in the middle of the night. This shit really happened.

The story is not about all that. The main Characer, Lev, is caught 1) looting a fallen Germain soldier of his knife and 2) doing that looting after curfew. That’s two offences for which his own army would kill him. He is taken to the The Crosses, a notorious prison, where he assumes he’ll be shot and heaped in a pile of deserters and looters. In the cell that night he meets Kolya, a soldier arrested for desertion.

In the morning they are taken to see the Colonel. Who offers them a reprieve on one condition, that they supply him with 1 dozen eggs before the wedding of his daughter the next week. This presents problems, as there are no eggs in Leningrad, as far as they know as all the egg laying chickens have long since been eaten for their meat.

But what can they do? They head out with a small wad of cash in search of the eggs. I don’t want to spoil the story so I won’t say any more about what happens. I will say that it is a very well written book, is short 258 pages, and is broken up into small chapters and sub chapters that you can easily blow through in a few minutes making it easy to read this book in the short time between when you get into bed and fall asleep.

The characters are well developed, full of surprises, realistic, and magnetic. You become attached to them and to their mission and their survival becomes important to you. The main character, Lev, is timid, quiet, inexperienced and young. Kolya is a bold carousing, literary know-it-all who is very unlikeable at first, but you come to understand him and like him a lot. Like isn’t right. You come to understand his value on multiple levels. Which is something that is important in literature and reality as well. Being able to get past the things that are off-putting or distracting to a person’s true value can have it’s rewards.

Reality again. What was my point? Reality is the every day. It’s going to work, dealing with douchey people on the street, interpersonal bullshit, competition. There’s is nothing remarkable about it no matter the camera angle. When you cross a boundary into a story, it’s not reality anymore. When you have to say, “True Story,” it gets even farther from reality, because the story is being told for a different reason, a different truth. When that true story is slightly implausible, When you have to assure your reader, “these events really happened” it becomes an adventure. And that’s something worth reading.

-M

-M

Blogs and Blogging

Some of you may have noticed me “liking,” tweeting and generally buzzing about posts on a new blog called The Gizzard Stone. This is my new blog venture that actually represents a step back for me.

Years ago, I started a blog called The Bacon Strip as a place for a group of my dirty hippie mountain biker friends to get together and share funny things, stories, news and stoke about skiing, mountain biking and life in general. Shortly thereafter I started this blog as a personal journal/creative space for myself.

Both blogs have changed and evolved, but more or less remain true to their original purpose and format. The thing that has changed is me and the amount of time and effort I put into maintaining them. I had thought that becoming self employed would reinvigorate my dedication to writing and blogging, and it has, to a limited degree. I still enjoy writing and sharing the interesting things I come across on the web, but my interests have shifted and I find myself with someone else’s interests to consider, namely, The Dude.

The Gizzard Stone

So I’d like to introduce you to my new blog, The Gizzard Stone: a directory of cool stuff to show your kid. This was born of one of our favirite things to do together at home which is look at animals on the iPad, then search for videos of animals on YouTube. It’s fun, simple, engaging and gives us things to talk about, questions to ask and answer and things to explore. Why “The Gizzard Stone?”

Since his first weeks though, Bowie has been a good partner for going out and exploring the real world. A role he has filled with more and more enthusiasm and skill with each passing week.

Many times I see families doing things together, but separate. Going to kid birthday parties, sidelined at a sports practice, etc. But my mom and dad were largely participant parents. They were far more likely to create experiences for me and my sisters that were engaging for themselves as well. Either directly, in the moment, or deferred gratification, creating skills and love for things like camping, skiing, the outdoors, that would pay dividends well above the investment.

The Gizzard Stone started out as just “cool stuff on the web,” but it’s going to expand in scope to just “cool stuff to show your kid.” Could be on the web, could be on the iPad, could be in real life. So I’ll be posting reviews of books, apps, places and things. All with the connection of things that both you and your kid will enjoy together.

I showed Bowie MonkeyMoon last night. He sat, completely attentive in my lap watching the short video. I said, “look! a monkey!” he said, “monkey.” I said, “Look! Rockets!” He said, “rocket.” I said, “look! the Moon!” He said, “Moon!” (he loves the moon…) Then when it was all over I said, “woah, dude. What just happened here? He said, “Cow” and started tapping the picture of the cow on the iPad screen.

I include more than just a neat photo or video on The Gizzard Stone. More than just a comment about it’s origin. The content is just a starting point. The spark that makes you curious about something, the map to get you started exploring, and a question, or two, to get you asking more.

Please take a look, show your kid. If you don’t have a kid, borrow one, and let me know what you think. If you would like to be a contributor, please contact me.

-M

For the Reno Collective Holiday Party and Cookie Battle, I made what Danielle says is the best cookies I’ve ever made (and I’ve made my fair share of cookies). These cookies start out with the standard Snickerdoodle recipe from the better homes and gardens cook book. If you do not own the Better Homes and Gardens Cook Book, click here to order it. Otherwise you have no business cooking anything.

Maple Sugar

I picked this maple sugar up at Whole Foods. It was about $16 for 2 cups. The exact amount I needed to make a double batch of the modified Snickerdoodle cookie recipe. Maple sugar is what’s left of maple sap after all the water is boiled away. It has a good maple flavor and is not super sweet. This product is fine grained, almost a confectioner sugar, but it worked just fine for the cookies.

Maple Bacon

For this purpose I wanted a thin sliced bacon that would crisp up nicely. Smoked bacon usually stays chewy. Farmer John is the bacon of choice for a nice light, crispy strip of bacon. The maple flavor is tasty. Its not organic or fancy, but it doesn’t need to be for a cookie. I used 7 strips which is about half the pack.

I fried it up crispy, then chopped it into bits and added it to the batter at the same time as I added the flour.

Rolling the Dough

Snickerdoodles are not rolled out and cut like a christmas cookie. That’s too much effort for me. For these you just get a glob, roll it into a ball, roll it in sugar without cinnamon for this purpose. I used a turbinado sugar for these.

Then you place them on the sheet and mash them down a bit and bake for 10 minutes at 375 degrees.

Apple Butter Frosting

This is a modified butter cream frosting. Butter cream frosting is butter, cream or milk and powdered sugar. Apple butter frosting is apple butter (I used 1 16 oz jar of R.W. Knudsen Organic Apple Butter), maple syrup ( just a splash) and powdered sugar.

The Cookie

You want to take the cookies out after they deflate a bit, but before they start to brown. The maple and turbinado sugar makes the color change hard to see, but the deflation is easy to spot.

The icing came out thin since I ran out of powdered sugar, but it is very tangy and tasty. To ice the cookies I spooned a small amount on the cookie and let it flow out. They turned out well. I plan to win the Cookie Battle!

-M

Drath was the name of the teacher who he was substituting for. English was the subject. It was a cold day. Nothing particularly noteworthy about it. Substitutes are loved for their pliability, their targetability. The advantage they have to be taken.

He was small and dark clothed. He wore a hat and an overcoat and a scarf. It was formal, and though he was in the room before we came in he took off outer vestments and laid them over Mr. Drath’s chair. It took a full minute and we watched him silently. He introduced himself to the class. Some students in the class recognized him. He’d been around, substituting for other subjects at other schools and other grades, though I’d never seen him before.

He wrote his name on the board, something longer than Hall, shorter than Habisham. Then, before we could really settle into misbehaving, working at the chinks in his armor, he started writing something none of us could make heads or tails of. The following is what he wrote:

James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher.

He gave us a few seconds to soak it in as he made his way up to the lectern, or the front of the desk, or whatever was in that classroom (I don’t recall). Nor do I recall how many commas he said were necessary, or if he gave a number. All he said was that the sentence could work, if properly punctuated.

No one had anything to say. It was pretty simple. He challenges us to punctuate it properly, then regailed us with weird stories and asides. Like a carney or a magic shop owner.

I can’t explain why I still remember that sentence, except that it’s sheer improbibility, and the idisyncratic way Mr. Hoeverhewas recited it. So matter of factly. like Bob Costas analyzing two responses of past perfect sentence construction.

“Welcome back, this is Bob Costas and what we just saw here in Mr. Hastington’s english class, made all the more incredible (a true head spinner) by the fact that he’s just a substitute teacher (of all things) is a sentence the likes of which we haven’t seen in years, if ever: James, while John had had “had,” had had, “had had,” “had had” had had a better effect on the teacher. Sports fans, I didn’t see that one coming, and I honestly have no idea how this class is going to react.”

But I do remember it, though I remember little else about the class. Not the room number, not the building name, not the name of a single other student who was in that class.

It comes to me at times when my active brain is doing some wrote task or droning activity and the pensive part of my brain needs to be occupied so it doesn’t start trouble. It comes to me. The single conjugation. Inflected by a quirky looking man and spoken like a side show barker at a carnival. Like what he was telling us with this uselss sentence was interesting, meant something or taught us a lesson that would last our whole life.

It didn’t for me, it didn’t for any of the other nameless people in that class room. I have to assume that. I don’t know. Maybe if I post this on Facebook one of my former class mates will comment and tell me their thoughts on the matter. That is if any of them remember.

For whatever reason, the sentence comes to me when I’m hiking up a hill through snow, grinding up a long climb on my bike. Taking step after step under a loaded pack. For some reason it comes to me then. When my brain has nothing to do but twiddle it’s thumbs. When what I’m doing is just basic mechanical motion, and my higher functioning brain starts to churn again on this meaningless little sentence.

The way Bob says it above is my best attempt to punctute this. It’s based on the way Mr. Hangnail said it, though slower and more nuanced. Several of us tried to get up and place the commas, just pinning tails on the donkey.

When he said it, he spouted it quickly. He had had to say it several times. He threw some commas up on the board, but it was still just a mess of hads to our eyes. We left class that day confused and disatisfied. Nothing bad happened, no one got to make the substitute squirm. No one tested his resolve. No one got the commas right. We felt we’d been cheated, in more ways than one.

Question:

Have you ever heard this sentence before? Can you punctuate better than i have above?

Happy Friday.

-M

This article on Cult Of Mac shows a bit of surprise that Ray Bradbury would be distrusting, and even hostile towards technology on the occasion of this book now becoming available on digital devices. They seem surprised that one of our most beloved futurists would feel this way. But to me it makes perfect sense. Other than the fact that he named his character in F451 after a pencil rather than a typewriter, here’s why Ray Bradbury hates technology based on some of his stories:

The Veldt: The Illustrated Man, 1951

In this story, parents use technology, a room that can take their children anywhere they like (think Holodeck…), to take care of their children for them. Technology replaced parental attention. Without spoiling the story for you, that goes horribly wrong.

In A Season Of Calm Weather: A Medicine for Melancholy, 1959

This is not a sci fi story, but it does show Bradbury’s trust of the human, emotional and ephemeral, at the expense of the mechanical, documentary and permenent. Which rings true when you experience the master art works at the Louvre among a throng of pushy tourists who spend enought time to snap a camera phone pic of the Mona Lisa before pushing their way out.

The main character is a huge fan of the work of Pablo Picasso who takes a trip to the south of france to soak in the atmosphere and works of Picasso.

The main character ends up finding Picasso creating free form frescoes with a stick in the wet sand of the beach as the sun is going down and the tide is coming in. The MC is faced with the choice, run to get his wife and a camera and attempt to preserve these master works, or simply enjoy them for what they are as they transit the short span of their existence.

This is a beautiful story that shows the sublime perfection of a moment, and an experience that is meant simply for you and you alone, that you can’t possibly share with anyone else. Technology has no place in these moments, and in-fact, destroys them.

The Time Machine: Dandelion Wine, 1957

This story shows how Bradbury feels that the synapses are always going to be greater than the circuits. It’s not what you think.

Two boys go to visit an elderly man in their town to hear his old stories. He is a time machine. They shout out a word and the man becomes a story, relating the past through his words and bright eyes as powerfully as being there yourself. Technology can not improve on what it means to remember, and share those memories directly with others.

The Pedestrian: Golden Apples of the Sun, 1951

I think we’ve forgotten in recent years, as many of the things predicted by scienc fiction over the last century have been realized, ipods, tablet computers, submarines, mobile phones, that most of science fiction has not been exhaulting of a utopic future, but a cautionary lesson not to proceed recklessly.

The pedestrian is a story about a man who decides to go for a walk. But in his world of the future, no one walks. Everyone stays inside their climate controlled homes, offices or automobiles comfortable, safe and convenient. It only makes sense.

But humans are goverend by emotion, spontenaity and irrationality, and Bradbury feels that that love/hate relationship with logic is where the spark of genius is in our design. So The Pedestrian decides to go for a walk at night. He is met by a police man who can find no other reason for such an activity besides malovelence, and so arrests him.

The fear is that

Technology robs us of our connection to our core humanity. Or at least it has the potential to. Simple as that. I am very conscious of this. As a person working in marketing and social media, a tech addict and a creative person, I make a conscious effort to subvert my own techno tendencies regularly and simply check out. It’s good for the soul and good for the mind.

That said, I’d buy a kindle just to have all of Bradbury’s work at my finger tips. Not as a way to preserve it from fire, as suggested in the above article. If someone wanted to rid the world of eBooks, in this connected environment, I’m sure a program could be written that could exterminate much of the content in the blink of an eye, without firemen. Not to mention that we know Amazon could easily recind our license to the work should Bradbury ever change his mind.

In the end, I don’t think Bradbury or any other author should get to dictate how the public consumes their content. A lot of Bradbury’s stories are already available online typed out and posted to the web by fans. That’s much more powerful, and hard to subvert than either physical books, or DRM controlled digital files. Even music can be ripped and played on any device we like. Only because books are hard to duplicate at home is this not posible with literature.

And I think if Bradbury were to be completely honest with himself he’d agree. Literatur is too important to dominate that way. If he fears a world where those works are targeted and destroyed at the detriment to society, then the conditions of royalties and publishing deals become meaningless. I’m happy to pay him a royalty for every copy I acquire, he deserves it. I just want to be able to hold it all in my hands at once.

-M

More Info

“Bradbury is far from the last digital holdout. Another K-12 classic, Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, is only available in print. None of Thomas Pynchon’s novels are available as e-books, although Pynchon has been characteristically quiet on the subject. Nor are any English translations of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and only a few of Marquez’s story collections and none of his classic novels are even available in Spanish. Early editions of James Joyce’s books are in the public domain, but Finnegans Wake, whose rights are tightly controlled by Joyce’s grandson, is not.” Wired Mag

“In the past, the outspoken Mr. Bradbury, now 91, has lambasted the Internet, e-books, “giant screens,” and the “moronic influence” they have on our culture. In 2009, he told The New York Times “the internet is a big distraction.” Yahoo!, he explained, had contacted him about putting one of his books on their site. “You know what I told them?” he told the Times. “’To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the internet. It’s distracting. It’s meaningless; it’s not real. It’s in the air somewhere.’” The Monitor

“However, to be fair, thanks to the Internet no one will ever be able to burn – or ban – a book ever again.” TechCrunch

Books referenced in this post

• Dandelion Wine
• Golden Apples of the Sun
• A Medicine for Melancholy
• The Illustrated Man
• Farenheit 451

-M

Heard fireworks last night
Thought the city was being bombed
Nice living in the hills

We used to live near downtown Reno. Reno has become a town addicted to fireworks. As if the casinos need to make their presence known. I think most of them in the summer time come from the Baseball games. Not sure why minor league ball games warrant fireworks at every game.

Reno fireworks come around 11:00 PM or so. About the end of an infant’s sleep cycle when it doesn’t take much to arouse them. We dealt with that a lot living down town. Now we live at the south end of town up on the hill. Close to the ski resort, close to trails, far from down town.

We used to sweat under our breath and cringe for the crescendo of fussing. Now we get agitated and look out the windows for plumes of smoke rising from town.

-M