Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire continues at its idiosyncratic pace. Martin says this volume started off as half of a book. Of course there’s no telling when we’ll get the other half. (He divided it by character and location, rather than chronologically, so there are whole story lines that don’t appear at all.)
I like long, all-consuming books, but it makes me grumpy to have to wait.
Francis Strand (How to learn Swedish in 1000 difficult lessons) has a charming anecdote with this zinger about believing in God:
The husband and I were taken aback. Do they even have a funeral for someone if no one comes?
“Yes,” she said, and sighed. “All the time. I just had one yesterday. It’s unbearably sad. Instead of speaking to the people who have come, I speak to the person who has died. It’s one of the worst parts of my job. And I think I couldn’t stand it if I didn’t believe in God.”
It must be unbearably sad to give a funeral when there are no guests, and yet I can’t help but think the “conversation” with the deceased would be quite moving as well as sad.
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.
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
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.
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.
by John Crowley by Marion Zimmer BradleyLeo 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.
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:
Since I’ve been totally negligent about the Friday Tenâ„¢, I thought I’d post these ten things I’m looking forward to doing while I visit London for the next eleven days:
There’s a great post with relevance to the whole “war on Christmas” buzz at Liz Opp’s The Good Raised Up: The Jew in me at Christmas time. She tells a story of being at meeting for worship on Christmas day and listening to the kids in First Day School:
I was learning that the story of Jesus’s birth was told in play and with great love to the children, rather than being told with hatred or malice against Jews.
When I talked to my family on Christmas day, my father and my sister each made reference to the Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays debate, both scoffing at the “political correctness” of “Happy Holidays.” It made me sad, their knee-jerk reaction.
My sister, who’s a small business owner, said she made sure to say Merry Christmas to every customer and had the window-painter put Merry Christmas on the shop windows. And I just thought to myself: good thing you’re in business in Brawley and not, say, Williamsburg.
I saw an actress in an interview saying she doesn’t mind when her Jewish friends wish her a Happy Hannukah, so why should anyone mind when someone says Merry Christmas. This sentiment seems to be at the center of objections by many cultural Christians. They so don’t get it. Such a lack of empathy. Have they never experienced being surrounded by people who ignore their reality? Can’t they even imagine it? Are they unable to make the cognitive leap to realizing that’s what it’s like for non-Christians in America?
I guess it’s just par for WASPs in America (and apparently the original WASPs, as well: fjm has an English perspective on the same problem).