Name Games

For Micetro

By William mOrriS DEaN
(aka Wosden & Moristotle)

Yesterday my “email friend” Maik Strosahl explained the formula he used to derive an alternative nickname for himself – “Micetro” – a nickname he characterized as expressing his creative essence: being a maestro of his poetic craft. Anyone who follows his columns can readily attest to that mastery.

The Universe Is a Friendly Place

The “logo” for my
public speaking enterprise

A handout poem

By Moristotle

About 30 years ago, I got it into my head that I wanted to be, and could be, a public speaker. I joined Chapel Hill’s Toastmasters Club and participated in speech contests, a number of which I won. My wife and I drove to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, during the OJ Simpson trial (1995) so I could participate in the regional finals (I did not win this one).

New day’s resolution: S-p-R

By Moristotle

[Originally published 10 years ago, on December 29, 2011]

Moristotle, you recently said that you’d be more mindful how you spend your time. Are you spending it better?
    If you’d asked me that yesterday, I don’t think I could have answered coherently—and not sure I can yet. Apparently, the challenge to be more mindful went deeper than I realized. It raises lots of difficult questions.
    For example?

Goines On: Those elusive leap years

Click image for more vignettes

In the few days remaining before their flight to California, Goines wondered whether the solution to the problem of calculating the day of the week for dates in past or future years might be a lot simpler than he had been imagining. What if he just used his mnemonic for the current year (“Mi Ki Ko Ranch” rattles Miquel) and then “shifted” to the year of the date in question?
    The calendar for next year varies from this year’s calendar by starting either 1 day or 2 days later in January, depending on whether this year is, or is not, a leap year (2021 is not). Leap years have 366 days, or 35 weeks plus 2 days. Last year’s calendar starts a day or two earlier in the week for the same reasons. Goines wasn’t going to solve this before they left, so he tried to stop thinking about it and finish packing.

Goines On: Stress junkie

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Goines told Bic he needed to finish the flyer that he was helping Bic with because the Goineses were going out of town for a week. Bic told him not to “stress himself” – if he didn’t finish before they left, it was okay. But the phrase brought Goines the realization that he wanted to get the job done before they left. Bic had just triggered the insight that when it comes to positive, creative stress, Goines was a junkie. He loved creative stress, he needed it!

Outside the Box: A suggestion for publicizing a book (or anything?)

By Moristotle

One particular member of the Moristotle & Co. staff comes up with unusual ideas so frequently, I’ve become used to it and usually don’t get all that excited. But this morning he came up with one that utterly floored me – so much so it reminded me that we do have this recurring column called “Outside the Box,” and the last time we published one was a little over a year ago (March 10, 2017).
    Ed Rogers had just recently had a big thought outside the box, when he suggested that the blog might have a “writer’s corner” – for the blog’s book authors to network and help one another with publishing, publicizing, and selling. I dutifully created such a corner and plugged in most of the advice that I could think of, including many items of actual experience from Ed himself, and from, for example, Jim Rix, Randy Somers, and Shirley Skufca Hickman, all of whom have written at least one book, published them, and sold many copies.

Remembering April 4, 2014

It started with “More about creativity”

By Moristotle

Thanks to Sharon Stoner for reminding us today, by commenting, of a “Fish for Friday” column published exactly three years ago today (when April 4 was a Friday). She made this comment:

I’ve often wondered if when I die will there be anyone left who knew me. Without friends all that is left is, alone!

Fourth Sunday through Tom's Looking Glass

Reflecting emotion and action

By Tom Lowe

The year 2007 found me working with St. Mary’s Senior Center, Alameda County Community Food Bank, and the ASSETS Senior Employment Opportunities program. The latter is a federally funded retraining project, part of LBJ’s Great Society initiatives of 1964, administered by the City of Oakland. I was spending quite a bit of time around Frank Ogawa Plaza, where Oakland’s City Hall is situated, and the photos of that year reflect that.

Fourth Sunday through Tom's Looking Glass

From the trenches of social change

By Tom Lowe

[Editor's Note: We are pleased to inaugurate a new monthly column featuring the photographs of Contributing Editor Tom Lowe.]

These photos from 2006 are from my involvement in the San Francisco Bay Area communities – social, political, and creative – I worked with that year. Basically, I shoot what catches my eye, people who bring passion and commitment to helping their fellows.

Fish for Friday

Edited by Morris Dean

[Anonymous selections from recent correspondence]

Attached is a photo of an Eastern Screech owl's protective coloring that was in today's paper: "Nature photographer has the patience to capture award-winning shots." The photographer is Graham McGeorge taken in the Okefenokee Swamp.

Thor's Day: Rest for the weary

David Hayward goes by "the naked pastor"

Wake up! This isn't church!

By Anonymous

Edited by Morris Dean

[Editor's Note: Sleeping during sermons must be a common occurrence, it's the subject of many jokes involving church. But a good proportion of church-goers are sleep-deprived people who'd do better to just sleep in on Sundays.]

Thor's Day: Don't blow my cover

Mr. Bean at church (Rowan Atkinson)

Notes from a church closet

By Anonymous

Edited by Morris Dean

[Editor's Note: After the previous column on overlooked opportunities afforded by boring sermons, someone sent me the jokes below who refused to identify him (or her) self, "because I don't want my family to find out I'm not a believer. They would disown me."]

Thor's Day: Boring sermons reconsidered

William Hogarth drawing

Opportunities in disguise

By Anonymous^1,2,3

Edited by Morris Dean

[Editor's Note: You may consider church a waste of time, but boring sermons do provide an opportunity to think up religious jokes. At your next opportunity, consult your muse and take notes on the leaflet you were handed when you entered the sanctuary.]

Thor's Day: Books that will worsen your thinking

By Morris Dean

Page 417 of my copy of John Brockman's 2012 book, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking^*, contains the following brief entry:

THESE WILL MAKE YOU STUPIDER

ALTIMUS PILOTEER
Essayist; poet; layman of science and the arts

New day's resolution: S-p-R

Moristotle, you recently said that you'd be more mindful how you spend your time. Are you spending it better?
    If you'd asked me that yesterday, I don't think I could have answered coherently—and not sure I can yet. Apparently, the challenge to be more mindful went deeper than I realized. It raises lots of difficult questions.
    For example?
    Well, first, I got off on questions of how humans in general could make better use of their time. Thinking about "obvious truths" such as that people ought to choose to eat healthier foods (when such choices are available to them) made me realize that I have virtually zero influence over other people's choices. As I said the other day, who's going to enforce them? And on what basis? Maybe it would be "better" overall for some people to eat as unhealthily as they possibly can—so that they'd die sooner and overpopulated Earth could get on with recycling their bodies.
    That sort of thinking would be a distraction.
    Indeed. My "new ten commandments" (or Christopher Hitchens's or George Carlin's, or anyone else's—except perhaps God's, if some new "God" should come along and bring Scripture up-to-date) will make next to no difference whatsoever.
    How could an update from "God" be an exception?
    Simply that millions of people believe that commandments that enjoy "God's" endorsement deserve fealty, even when they contradict clearly superior ethical principles.

Ah, so it really comes down to what "better" means? And maybe that comes down to each individual's having to decide for him or herself—at least in a more or less free society, if not in places like North Korea, where the State decides for you, or in an Islamic theocracy, where the local mullah tells you what to do?
    Right. Just yesterday did I finally come around to the realization that perhaps the main way I could spend my time better would be to stop thinking (and writing) about how other people could better spend theirs. They're going to spend it how they will. Even principles with "God's" endorsement for how people spend their time won't cut it with someone who won't buy into them.

So, what did you do this morning to spend your time better on a strictly personal level?
    I took a book to the restroom after breakfast rather than a Sudoku puzzle. Doing Sudokus is absorbing (and may even have health benefits in terms of "sharpening the brain"), but I'm sure I get more out of serious book reading.
    As simple as that?
    Yes, quite. Simple might be the operative word. Another distraction I was having besides thinking about how people in general could better spend their time was the fact that some questions run so deep they could overturn my life—like, Why not live somewhere else? Why not find new friends? We need to let some things lie. At any rate, we can't reasonably make huge changes all at once, unless we're in a very dangerous situation and need to extract ourselves from it at once. Someone I know recently fled a man who had been beating her and she thought might be planning to kill her.

Okay. So, what else did you do this morning?
    Well, something I've actually been doing for several days—"pencil push-ups" that my neuro-ophthalmologist mentioned again recently for strengthening my eye muscles for reading. (I do thirty reps of following the eraser on a pencil as I move it to and from my eyes.) I'd neglected this exercise of late, but became mindful that perhaps I should be doing them. Also, I stretched before even getting out of bed. I got myself more fully awake before stumbling into the kitchen, if only in order to be more self-aware of what I was doing so that I could do it more efficiently—and maybe even enjoy it more. (I think I did.) And when I was turning on my computer to do my "daily" blog (this is the first one since Sunday), I got out my new cell phone to finish ripping an audiobook to it. And while I was waiting for the computer to be ready to rip, I started updating my contacts...It actually started to seem ridiculous. I was afraid I would forget some of what I wanted to say in this web log.

So, even just "doing the simple things" can get pretty involved?
    Indeed! It made me realize that trying to make better use of my time can get me off into yet another distraction—the idea that there's an absolutely best thing to do, right now. That kind of thinking tends to paralyze me, throw me into confusion.
    So, have you found something solid now that you can more or less rely on?
    I think so. Actually, it's something from more than half a lifetime ago, some advice I heard from a traveling lecturer. Simply to pause before responding to stimuli (of my own choosing) in order to think of alternatives and inject a bit of "free choice" as to what my response will be. Stimulus-pause-Response.
    Why did you put air quotes around "free will"?
    Are you sure your will is actually free?
    Ah, right. I see what you mean...Anyway, may we call the pause-before-responding maxim a "new day's resolution"?
    Sure, why not? You know how I dislike holidays.

The pause that refreshes

When the slogan "the pause that refreshes" came to me this morning, I thought I was remembering it from Pepsi Cola advertising. Maybe I was, but in an article on cola advertising, that particular slogan isn't listed as having been one of either Coke's or Pepsi's, although the word "refreshing" occurs in several other slogans.

Well, never mind. The refreshing pause that I'm talking about is the pause that an aware person interjects between a stimulus and the person's otherwise automatic response. That pause is (or can be) refreshing precisely because it gives the person the opportunity to exercise a choice as to whether to act automatically or in some new way—even a very innovative way.

In the religious context, a person's automatic response to "the stimulus of life" (or perhaps more poignantly to the stimulus of learning that we all die) might be to believe as the person's parents believed.

Muhammad Asad reports in his memoir, The Road to Mecca (1952), that he found very attractive to himself personally what he observed in the 1920's to be the cultural tendency of Arabs to do just that: believe as their parents (and virtually everyone else around them) believed. To Asad, this was a very good thing, integrating an Arab's physical and spiritual life into something peaceful, natural, anxiety-free—unlike the European's neurotic, awkward, spiritual anxiety. In other words, whatever pause the Europeans had taken to cut themselves free from precedent was, to Asad, anything but "refreshing" spiritually.

Yet myself, very unlike Asad, I feel rather at home and comfortable with pausing to exercise my thought and creativity. I can hardly imagine ever becoming a "Muslim automaton."

Anyway, that's my current take on one of Asad's theses in The Road to Mecca (as I now read Chapter 5 of 12).