Audiobooks Continue to Make Me Happy.

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Ear budspixabay.com

I wrote in a previous post about my discovery that I was completely wrong about audiobooks, as they aren’t dull and plodding at all but a way for me to include reading in my day without having to sit down and open a book to the exclusion of all other activities.  (Back in the days before we had a TV, or even a DVD player on the computer, we spent our evenings reading aloud, just like cultured nineteenth-centurians, so I should have been totally gung-ho about audiobooks anyway. Everything old is new again!)

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Clear-Eyed Realism, Not Muddled Guilt.

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PicturePhoto from TED

Pictured is the journalist Leslie T. Chang at her TED talk given in June of 2012.  (And if you’re not familiar with TED talks, I would strongly recommend a sampling of them, freely available on YouTube, Netflix, and on their own website, ted.com.  TED stands for “technology, education, and design,” which covers just about any subject you’d like to think of.  These talks are held in various venues around the world, and to be chosen to give one is a great honor. Speakers must limit themselves to 18 minutes or less, so you never have to think you’re getting into some long-term scuzzamagorski.  You can listen to a TED talk while you’re eating your lunch.  You’ll be seeing other TED-talk-related posts on this blog.)

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The Wit and Wisdom of Aunt Eller.

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Oklahoma

“Oh, lots of things happen to folks. Sickness or being poor and hungry, being old and afeared to die. That’s the way it is, cradle to grave, and you can stand it. There’s just one way: you gotta be hardy. You gotta be. You can’t deserve the sweet and tender in life unless’n you’re tough.”

From Oklahoma!, last act, spoken by the character Aunt Eller. I’d never watched the movie or seen the musical, but our local PBS station was running it Saturday night and I figured it might be worth 15 minutes or so.  Of course I got drawn in.  We’ve found that old “classic” movies tend to be a disappointment.  (This is particularly true of any movie starring Katherine Hepburn.  I agree wholeheartedly with the critic who said, “Miss Hepburn runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.”)  I wasn’t expecting much but ended up thoroughly enjoying the show, with the notable exception of the dream ballet sequence, which is

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I Get Reminded of Southern Gothic While Hiking in the West.

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Trail in the Colorado mountainsI’m not completely sure what this post has to do with happiness or intentionality,  except that unexpected connections can be a source of pleasure.  So this shot was taken on our hike last week, the one that was supposed to have us end up at Blue Lake but which ended considerably before that because there was so much snow still on the trail.

As I took a look backward and snapped this picture suddenly the words “a worn path” popped into my head. And I remembered the short story with that title by the Southern writer Eudora Welty, about an old black woman who goes into town to get medicine for her grandson and who meets with various obstacles along the way.  Nothing very dramatic happens, although she does meet up with a hunter who points a gun at her and also falls into a ditch. Instead, we gradually find out about her situation and her character.  Her grandson swallowed lye three years before, and whatever it is she’s getting for him is “soothing medicine.”  We know that the story isn’t too long after the Civil War, as she says, “I never did go to school, I was too old at the Surrender.”  And we know that she and her grandson are alone in the world.  At the end of the story she has made it to Natchez, gotten the medicine, and is heading back home.  And that’s it.  (If you’d like to read the whole story, you can access it through the wonderful University of Virginia website that has digitized many works.  If you’d like to get a more comic side of Welty, you can read “Why I Live at the P. O.” According to good old Wikipedia, Welty was also a photographer, and this story was inspired by a picture she took of a woman ironing in the back room of a small Southern post office.)

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Conventional Wisdom Is Usually Wrong.

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book cover for Think Like a FreakThink Like a Freak by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, 2015, by HarperCollins.  Available in hardcover, paperback, Kindle, and audiobook formats.  I highly recommend the audio version, which is read by Dubner.

​Visit the authors’ website at freakonomics.com to access an enormous trove of material, including their podcast episodes going back to 2010.  Just about any subject you can think of is probably in those archives somewhere.

If you haven’t already done so, you should read Levitt and Dubner’s two previous books, Freakonomics and Super Freakonomics.  All three of these books deal with the way that human beings respond to incentives.  Conventional economics says that people respond in a rational way and that therefore market forces are also rational.  “Enlightened self-interest” will always win the day, we’re told, thus leaving everyone better off. If only that were true!  What is true is that the law of unintended consequences always rises up to bite us.  We think we’ve set up a great system, but only after it’s running do we see how it really

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Lessons From Mom’s Grand Canyon Trip.

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I was so reminded of my mom while I was on our horseback-riding trip last week.  The photo below is a family treasure, taken in 1948 (as you can see by the notation in the lower left corner).  She’s the fifth person down from the top of the line, the one with the scarf on her head.  Take a look and then scroll down below the picture to read the rest of the story.

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It’s the People Who Make the Experience.

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Grinning cowboy holding his ranch dogHere’s a picture of one of the two guides who took us on our wonderful, wonderful four-hour horseback-riding trip last week outside Ouray, Colorado through the company Action Adventures.  The other guide will show up in a later post.  These guys were just great:  friendly, conversational, helpful . . . you name it.  They took us on an absolutely magnificent back-country ride to the top of Mt. Baldy.  (If you’d like to get a flavor of how steep and narrow the trail was you can watch this video of a similar ride, or portions thereof–it’s not terribly high quality but shows the conditions quite well.  As far as I know it’s not associated with Action Adventures.)

 

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A Peek at What’s to Come

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notebook page crammed with blog ideas

Here’s the page from my Filofax organizer where I scribbled down ideas for future blog posts as they occurred to me on Jim’s and my trip last week to celebrate our 24th wedding anniversary.  It may look like a bunch of hieroglyphics to you, but  in amongst the greasy-from-sunscreen sections where the pen wouldn’t write are references to Eudora Welty, the importance of memory, and how the people you meet on a trip can make or break the experience.  There’s an answer to the burning question:  Should you go for the four-hour horseback ride or settle for the two?  All this to be addressed in future entries.  Be sure to check back for these nuggets!

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What do you care what people think?

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Book cover for Blood Will OutBlood Will Out:  The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade by Walter Kirn.

One of these days I’m going to write about the book by Richard Feynmann that actually has the title of this post.  That’s a truly great book about a truly great genius, who absolutely and positively refused to be guided by other people’s opinions.

This book, though, is about someone, actually two someones, whose whole lives were bound up in caring about what other people thought of them.  While there is indeed a murder and a mystery in this book,

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