Taking miracles for granted

     Miracles are all around us every day, yet we take them only as our due.

     Consider glass.  What would our lives be like without this miraculous stuff?  It’s everywhere and it’s essential to the quality of our lives.  It’s made by melting simple sand, one of the most abundant materials on our planet, yet it’s incredibly durable, it can withstand extreme temperatures while remaining dimensionally stable, and, fantastically, we can see through it as though it were not even there. 

     Nobody seems to know how long glass has been around, but there’s a 5,000-year-old example in a British museum.  The Indians didn’t have glass in their abodes when the Pilgrims arrived in America wearing too many clothes, but Virginia settlers built a glass factory in the early 1600s and started putting rippled windows in their buildings.  Many of those windows still survive and serve.

     Without glass our homes would be dark boxes.  It lets in natural light and gives us expansive views while serving as a barrier to the elements.  Without glass, vehicles as we know them would never have been built, Edison would never have been able to invent the light bulb, and we would not have developed clear mirrors that let us see ourselves as others do.  Because of its miraculous optical qualities—its ability to bend light—glass can be fashioned into prisms that spread light into its colorful spectrum, and it can be made into lenses that help near- or far-sighted people see with great resolution.  It gives us cameras that allow us to faithfully capture still and moving images.  It can be crafted into precision mirrors and lenses that bring distant objects close through binoculars, and that even let us peer far out across deep time into the vastness of the Universe through telescopes.

     Glass is only one among many daily miracles that greatly enrich our lives, but I think it deserves special recognition.

     I propose a National Glass Day on which we should all raise a glass in toast to this magical material.

Phil

Wordplay

     We wordsmiths have lots of tools in our English kit, 470,000 of them in fact, according to Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, enough so we’ll never run out of material for crosswords, spelling bees, and Scrabble games.  They’re fascinating in their scope and beauty and power.

     I don’t envy any foreign adult trying to learn English, though, simply because there are so many words and attendant potential confusions.  For example, there are at least 368 words that can serve as both a noun and a verb (and occasionally even an adjective as well), like cough, trip, kiss, whisper, glue, arrest, duck, service, taunt, hope, dart.

     Appropriately, some words look and/or sound like their meanings.  The word servile itself seems to cringe, even if you didn’t know what it means.  Curmudgeon perfectly expresses its meaning (and yes, I count several of them among my friends).  Zip looks fast just standing still, as does its more sophisticated cousin zipper.  Foible is inherently unserious, capricious, and eccentric just by the look and sound of it.

     Then there are those words I’ve always thought have meanings that don’t suit them at all.  Napkin, for example, should have been reserved for babies born to a race of mythical diminutive creatures known as Naps, who perhaps inhabit the leafy glades of Napa Valley.  Tantamount would be a perfect name for a volcano on a fictional planet called Tanta in the dozenth sequel of Star Wars.  The word promulgate is much too heavy and visceral for its meaning.  I see it better as meaning ‘digestion in the age of the dinosaurs’ as in: “After a delicious lunch of triceratops tail with a side of palm trees, the tyrannosaurus rex spent the afternoon just basking in the sun and promulgating.”  A chihuahua should never have been an annoying yappy little ankle-biter of a dog, but a sexy Latin dance instead, which one performs like the cha-cha but with a lot of hot salsa added.

     While I’m ranting, I’d also like to start a long-needed revolution in the naming of sports teams.  I understand that we’re the most successful predators ever to live on this tired planet, but must we carry that tradition over into our games by co-opting all those scary names of the lesser predators?   I say we change them all to more innocent, comfortable monikers:  The Chicago Gerbils, The Memphis Rabbits, The Houston Turtles, The New England Chipmunks, The Miami Manatees, The Philadelphia Chickadees, The LA Loons.

     Anyway, I’ve calculated that I only have to copy a quarter of the nearly half-million words in Webster’s Unabridged to create a number-one NY Times best-selling novel.

     I just need to figure out which words and in what order.

Phil

Where is the Internet?

     It’s probably the most important and complex infrastructure ever devised in all human history, yet who can point to it?  Almost everyone on Earth has access to it for quickly retrieving any conceivable kind of interesting and helpful information and for globally communicating, yet few seem to know exactly what it is.  Like the air we breathe, it’s invisible, yet it’s everywhere.

     In large part it can indeed be imagined as a net thrown over the planet.  It is interconnected by thousands of miles of 329 undersea cables and buried land cables, which crisscross the ocean beds and transmit the vast majority of the world’s data, assisted by numerous satellites and cellular networks.  It is a grid or mesh in which any computer can converse with any other computer on the planet, provided they both are connected to that Net.

     The Net is wired into some 4,000 co-location data centers around the world, half of which are in the United States, and each of which hosts many websites, which are small segments of the World Wide Web, which is in turn built on top of the Net.  There are dozens of root name servers scattered around the planet, but operated by only twelve independent private companies, where domain names are translated into IP addresses that all our devices—computers, tablets, smartphones—can then converse with.  There are 13 vast Google data centers, seven of them in the United States and six of those in the Midwest, where your search history is stored.  There are four massive Facebook data centers, three in the United States and one in Scandinavia, loaded with cute pet photos, vacation vids, birthday and holiday wishes, friend requests, and political rants.  There are other related Net components and filaments, but these are the major ones.

     So now if somebody asks you what the devil the Net is, you’ll be able to explain it to them, right?

Phil 

Six-word short stories

     Ernest Hemingway is credited with originating this ultra-brief story form.  His memorable example is:

     FOR SALE: Baby shoes.  Never worn.

     Narrative Magazine, in addition to sponsoring various prestigious fiction, poetry, and nonfiction contests, regularly publishes six-word stories on their website and on their iPhone app.  They pay $50 per story (that’s a generous $16.66 per word; I’ve worked for far less in the magazine business over the years).

 A few examples:

      YOUTH by Gabriella Deich

     Three words.  Never spoken.  Always regretted.

     GRIEF, by Alistair Daniel

     Without thinking, I made two cups.

     IN COUNTRY, by Robert Olen Butler

     Saigon Hotel.  Decades later.  He weeps.

     SHY, by sixteen-year-old Marlon Jiminez

     Sitting next to her, saying nothing.

     ERUDITION, by Rickey Pittman

     Politician’s library burns.  Both books lost.

     You can read more examples on the Narrative website in wide variety.  It’s astonishing to me that so much vivid imagery and emotion can be stirred by so few words.

     I’ve come up with a dozen or so and have recently submitted them.

On some bad-weather day, while you’re busily procrastinating, why not take a break and try a few yourself?  They’re more of a challenge than you might think.

     They’re fun, too.

Phil

Holiday thoughts

     On Friday night, 15 December 2017, 45 law enforcers, led by the Jones County, NC, Sheriff’s Office, set up a surprise checkpoint both ways on Highway 70, a main artery that connects coastal NC with points west.  The county is a sleepy, sparsely-populated rural one.  The officers began at 11:15 p.m. and ran the checkpoint for four hours.

     The checkpoint resulted in 16 drug charges, 7 seatbelt violations, 5 alcohol violations, 6 registration violations, 5 driving with license revoked, 3 driving without a license at all, 2 carrying a concealed weapon illegally, one insurance violation, one fictitious tag, and one DUI.  They issued appropriate citations and made three arrests.

     All this in just four hours outside of drive time in a typical rural county.  Extrapolate these figures to a similar four-hour period on all the main arteries in just NC and the results would be mind-numbing.  These are apparently the kinds of drivers with whom we share our highways these days.  And we’ve every reason to believe the figures would be much worse on a holiday eve when bottled cheer flows freely across the land.  According to a 2014 NC report, one out of three fatal crashes in NC involves alcohol.  North Carolina had 411 alcohol-related vehicle deaths in 2014.  According to the National Safety Council, a total of 40,000 people died senselessly on our nation's highways in 2016, almost a third of those alcohol-related. (For some perspective, that means in just 18 months, more Americans die on the roads than died in the whole decade of the Vietnam War.)  In addition to alcoholic lubrication, throw in drug use, cell phone talking and texting while driving, speeding, lane-weaving, passing on the right, and idiots who don’t even have a license or a valid registration or insurance, and driving for you and me becomes one of the most dangerous activities we can do.  It’s even worse around the holidays.

     So please be careful and defensive out there.

Phil

If it seems too familiar, it is

            

          As they walked along the shore, the sky above as blue as a robin’s egg and filled with clouds like cotton balls, waves lapping the sand beside them, she slipped her delicate hand in his.  He turned his darkly-handsome head and beamed down upon her like sunshine.  Her lips were like rose petals, and he longed to ravish her right then and there and the devil take the consequences.  She felt faint with desire, and the wise words of her grandfather echoed in her ears: “Remember, my child, the world belongs to the brave at heart, you get what you pay for, and a rolling stone gathers no moss.”

          What’s wrong with this writing?  It reeks with the all-too-familiar phrase, with the worn-out metaphor, with clichés—expressions that were once clever and delightfully fresh but through heavy overuse have become trite or stereotypical.  You know many such worn-out expressions: the silvery path of moonlight on water, bird in the hand, fit the bill, just the ticket, far cry, labor of love, cute as a button, good as gold, old as time, babe in the woods, better late than never, worst nightmare, we need to move forward, take the bull by the horns, the time has come, we are committed, neat as a pin, undying love, quick as lightning, tongue in cheek, ugly as sin, all talk and no action, oh . . . my . . . god.  And how many thousand times have you heard the word awesome used so far this year to describe everything from a double rainbow to a fried Twinkie?

          Travel brochures, company mission statements, news casts, and political speeches are littered with such tattered stuff.  It’s one of the worst symptoms of lazy thinking and lazy writing.

         

          Many clichés we see so often in bad writing are not even true.  Do gunshots really “ring out”? I’ve never heard a shot do so, and I’ve spent many hours at target ranges firing both long guns and hand guns.   A gunshot is a harsh, percussive, jolting insult to the hearing, like being clapped on both ears by a ninja.  A gunshot does not ring out like a door chime.

          If you want your writing to be fresh and realistic and engaging, invest the time required to study your surroundings until you can describe them in original ways.  Go to the seashore or go outside on a moonlit night and sit and look and listen.  Discard those clichés that come so easily to mind and replace them with your own words, with descriptions you’ve never heard before.  Study people the same way.  Mentally record their features and mannerisms.  Listen to their speech.  This will soon become habitual.  Your writing will improve considerably, and as a pleasantly surprising secondary benefit, you’ll also see the world as you never have before.

        

         Years ago, I began to experience the world around me in wonderful new depth and clarity when I began taking photos to accompany my magazine articles, because to take quality photos, I had to become aware of light in all its nuances.  I had to begin sensing optimum composition.  I needed to learn how to recognize and capture the most intense and poignant and interesting candid moments in people’s lives.  Observation is a valuable learned skill that I believe has helped enrich both my nonfiction and fiction.  My readers will be the judges.

          There’s a true story that’s instructive.  A writer was once assigned to interview the great John D. MacDonald (the late popular author of the Travis McGee series and one of my early idols).   But when the writer came away from the interview, he realized MacDonald had learned far more about the writer than the writer had learned about the intended interviewee.  One of MacDonald’s honed assets was to ceaselessly study the world around him until he gained fresh perspectives, which showed in his writing and helped earn him a wide and loyal readership.

          So, here’s a cardinal rule: If a phrase feels familiar, it’s likely a cliché.  Don’t use it.

Phil 

      

Responsible reporting

                  If you don't read the newspaper
                  you are uninformed, if you do
                  read the newspaper you are
                  misinformed. —Mark Twain

                  (I’ll update that to include radio and TV news these days as well.)

          My mother was a newspaper reporter, and she told me something I've never forgotten.  She said, “Be careful about trusting the news.  It’s absurdly easy for incompetent or unethical reporters to color it.  Let’s say, for example, the Sheriff is in Boston speaking at a law enforcement conference.  There’s a terrible local crime while he’s away.  If I don’t happen to like the Sheriff or if I disagree with his policies, I could choose to report only that he was unavailable, or that he could not be reached for comment.  It would be true, but it wouldn't be honest, and readers might well take it to mean he’s not doing his job.  Do you understand?”

          Sadly, Mom’s advice has grown even more wise considering today’s pseudo-news reporting.

          Whole networks have obvious one-sided political agendas.  Newscasters are as much ego-brandishing celebrities as reporters, and seem to become overnight experts on any number of topics from nutrition to child-rearing to environmental issues to foreign affairs to astrophysics.  They often essentially pre-judge the guilt or innocence of alleged transgressors and they don’t hesitate to slant the news, even to the extent of inciting violence over this or that incident that instead ought to be handled not in the media but within the established legal system, which is all we have in America for any semblance of true justice.

          Editorializing and commentary in journalism, when clearly labeled as such, are protected under our constitution and rightly so, but straight news reporting should be conducted with professional honesty, integrity, thoroughness, accuracy, and absolute objectivity.  Allowing us, the reading and viewing public, to make up our own minds on the issues.

          But good luck with that in today's world.

Phil