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Month: January 2006

  • The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

    I decided to read Stephen Covey’s book because I was interested in the FranklinCovey planning system. While Covey has some ideas and suggestions that may work for me on the level of technique, his assertions that he’s promoting some sort of universal truths that go deeper than technique don’t fly with me. I found his endless examples to be full of hierarchical, elitist, and power-over thinking (even though he preaches win/win). (And yes, I mean preaches.) There were a few places where I wrote things like “manipulative bastard” in the margins.

    He lists basic principles (his seven habits are entirely premised on universal principles that “map the way things are”) in only two locations (pages 34 and 323 in my edition). They include such things as fairness, integrity, human dignity, service, quality, potential. Those lists are fine, as far as they go. But he also repeatedly equates “principles” with “natural law.” When someone as highly educated and widely read as Covey uses the words “natural law,” he can’t be ignorant of the implications of that phrase, and he demonstrates that he is no friend of mine.

    In the “About the Author” statement in the back of the book, it says, “As a father of nine and grandfather of forty-three, he received the 2003 Fatherhood Award from the National Fatherhood Initiative, which he says is the most meaningful award he has ever received.” Well, Stephen R. Covey, I have a couple of principles for you: sustainability, carrying capacity, right sharing.

  • Some religions get all the best stuff

    Because I registered at the Forward (the Yiddish/English newspaper based in New York), I get some interesting advertising emails. Here’s the website for the most recent one, which I thought was pretty kitschy: NeaTzit — The Ultimate in Tzitzit.

    NeaTzit is the original tee-shirt tzitzit and the only one that carries Kosher certification from Torah Giants

  • Overpackaging

    There’s a good article on overpackaging in Britain in the magazine of the Guardian: The Observer | Magazine | One family, one month, 50kg of packaging. Why?.

    ‘Morrisons coconuts are shrink-wrapped to ensure that they reach the customer in the very best condition. The packaging helps to keep the product fresh, limit damage from breakages, stop coconut hairs getting into other foodstuffs during transport and allows an information label to be attached.’ While coconut hair has never been one of my top 10 worries, this is probably enough for the supermarket to justify its shrink-wrap decision on the grounds that the consumer demands it. Crediting dodgy packaging to the consumer’s wants and needs is difficult to refute and explains why, despite an EU law which forbids overpackaging, experts can only cite three examples of prosecutions in the UK in the past decade.

  • Ten times four things

    OK, so it’s a day late to be a Friday Ten (more observed in the skipping than the posting), but it is a ten. And it’s the Four Things meme that’s been going around. No one’s tagged me (that I’ve noticed), but I’ve really liked reading other’s lists, so I just decided to do it.

    Four jobs I’ve had:
    1. boll-weevil trap checker
    2. account executive compensation specialist
    3. deli counter clerk
    4. editor
    Four movies I can watch over and over:
    1. Top Hat (really, anything with Astaire and Rogers)
    2. Philadelphia Story
    3. Bringing Up Baby
    4. The Thin Man
    Four books I could read over and over
    1. The Lord of the Rings  by J.R.R. Tolkien
    2. Little, Big by John Crowley
    3. A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
    4. Heritage of Hastur by Marion Zimmer Bradley
    Four TV shows I love:
    1. Lost
    2. Stargate SG‑1
    3. Battlestar Galactica
    4. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
    Four places I’ve lived:
    1. Brawley, California
    2. Blokzijl, Overijssel, Netherlands
    3. Camden, New Jersey
    4. Dorchester, Massachusetts
    Four places I’ve vacationed:
    1. London
    2. Key West
    3. Grand Tetons
    4. Montreal
    Four of my favorite dishes:
    1. chicken tikka masala
    2. potato (potato salad, potato pancakes, aloo chat, . . .)
    3. cheese
    4. dark chocolate
    Four sites I visit daily:
    1. Pepys’ diary
    2. Astronomy picture of the day
    3. Guardian Unlimited
    4. Wim van der Meij Etsen’s photoblog
    Four places I would rather be right now:
    1. London
    2. Lerwick, Shetland
    3. Amsterdam
    4. Forbidden City
    Four bloggers I am tagging:
    1. docsmartypants
    2. black thorn
    3. not-so-fresh
    4. insert your name here

  • A Life Stripped Bare: My Year Trying to Live Ethically

    Leo Hickman is a journalist at the Guardian, where he undertook an extended experiment in ethical living. This book is the result. I picked it up in a bookstore in Birmingham and finished it just after I returned home to Boston.

    I had seen it in passing in a bookstore in London, and when I decided I’d look for it in B’ham, I went up to a clerk and said I was looking for a book with “naked” in the title and “a year of living ethically” in the subtitle. He eventually found it for me!

    It’s a good book, and it raises some real questions, but it also shows its roots as a series of newspaper features.

  • The Artful Teapot

    Yesterday I went with Bob to see The Artful Teapot at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. It was very entertaining. Some of my favorites were not the art teapots or the examples of high design. There were two English teapots shaped like a cauliflower and a pineapple from I think the 18th century (maybe 19th). There were also two examples of a very clever kind of teapot: Simple Yet Perfect, which allow you to brew more than one cup and leave the tea in the pot without it continuing to steep.

    There were also some lovely art teapots and lovely or clever sculptures made in the form of a teapot. Here’s one of my favorites, from the PEM webpage for the exhibit:

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