Hiatus

I realize I have too many irons in the fire these days so I’m going to have to take a bit of a blog break, I’m afraid. Being too busy does two things to me. It leaves little time to blog, but it also saps me of blog worthy thoughts, really.

With that I’ll take a break. For how long, I’m not sure. There is hope that in a month or so I might have a rhythm hammered out that would make more room for blogging.

I’m not set up with an email subscription, so if you don’t happen to already make use of RSS feeds, you are welcome to email me and I’ll in turn manually email you when I start up again…if you wish.

alicia.d.camel [at] gmail.com

This blog has been blessed with interesting readers and I appreciate that you take the time out of your own busy days to read and comment. Thank you. Best wishes.

Until next time.

P.S. Check out ALL the uses of to, two and too in the 2nd sentence. I didn’t notice it until just now. Must be a sign. I’m going out to buy a lottery ticket.

Imagine that!

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today…

Cool idea: Old calendars

I like this from Tina, of Pecan Corner: vintage calendars.

Tina writes, “I didn’t know until a few years ago when I was printing a calendar page for a letterpress bundle, but there are only 14 different calendar grids.” Click through, for she links to a site that’ll tell you which years match each other…then go out and find yourself a vintage calendar to use instead of a plain old 2009 one.

There is nothing new under the sun!

We’re lucky enough to have Tina comment here every now and then and I’m putting Pecan Corner up on the side bar.

Alice is reading: Virus of the Mind

Currently reading Virus of the Mind, by Microsoft’s Richard Brodie. It seems to be one of the original books dedicated to the science of memetics, which is heavily grounded in evolutionary psychology and also implicated in blogology as the foundation of the word “meme” which floats around every now and then.

meme: a unit of information in a mind whose existence influences events such that more copies of itself get created in other minds.

or blogs, as it were. I never knew where that name came from until now.

According to the introduction of the book, the main question around memetics goes like this:

Will we allow natural selection to evolve us randomly, without regard for our happiness, satisfaction or, spirit? Or will we seize the reins of our own evolution and pick a direction for ourselves?

Skimming through, looks like one of those books that paints a pretty clear picture of society’s current perceptions…I’m looking forward to reading it!

Banner photo

A reader in Saskatchewan has gifted me with several of his beautiful photographs for the blog update. So many lovely ones that I’m going to have to rotate them to avoid choosing.

I picked the hay bales first. Natch. ‘Tis the season. Besides, camels are always thinking about their next great snack…

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Yo Yo Ma

I like this.

A well timed moment of reprieve from the dregs of typical political life.

Full video clip at the Globe.

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Monte Solberg: “Nothing we didn’t see every week at cabinet meetings! Lol. “

Playing around with the blog…

and I have to wake up early tomorrow so if I have to quit in the middle and leave things all goofy it will be my spit in the eye of perfectionism.
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Half an hour later: That oughta do it. Now I’m on the hunt for a banner. 770 x 200 pixels. Some other time.

Alice Reads: Whatever Happened to Penny Candy?

Once in a while a person stumbles on a treasure and when they do, it is right to stand back and admire the gift. I learned of Whatever Happened to Penny Candy?, by Richard Maybury (1989) in the comments section of Greg Mankiw’s blog.

It is a skinny little book with large print, written as a series of letters from “Uncle Eric” to a fabricated nephew. These letters lay out the basics of economics from the history of money, inflation, depression and a bunch of economic terms that will knock your socks off.

Written to suit a grade 9 reading level, this is one of those books you can breeze through in an hour or two and come away with a framework of reality so that when you read Greg Mankiw or the Captain, you can understand what in the Sam Hill they are saying. Consider this book the Cole’s Notes of life. Not only that, your intelligence quotient will jump 3 notches in a matter of minutes. Work smarter! Not harder!

Listen to this commentary on the auto industry:

By joining unions and going on strike, workers get higher wages. Then businesses must raise the prices of their goods o they can get the money to pay the higher wages.

The workers see the higher prices. They demand higher wages so they can pay the higher prices. Then the business managers must raise prices further to pay the higher wages.

For instance, the managers of Ford and Chrysler raise the prices of their cars. The workers cannot buy the higher priced cars so they demand higher wages. The managers must then raise the prices of the cars to pay the higher wages. Around and around they go, first a strike, then a price increase, then another strike, then another price increase, and so forth. Wages and prices spiral upward. The wage/price spiral sounds logical, but you must ask a question. Where did the money come from?

Chrysler can ask any price it wants for its cars, from 10 dollars to 10 million dollars. But it will only get the money if the money exists. Where did the money come from?

An auto worker can demand any salary, from 10 dollars per hour to 10 million dollars per hour. But he will only get the money if the money exists. Where did the money come from?

The answer, of course, is that someone printed it.

Yessirree. Someone might want to FedEx a copy to the White House.

Do you homeschool? Teach junior high Social Studies? Just want to sound smarter at parties? Whatever Happened To Penny Candy? is a gem and it is out of print so it could be said that it is a RARE gem. You’ll have to go hunting if you want it. The price will go up if there’s too much demand for it dontcha know.

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Oops! I lied about it being out of print. Mises seems to be selling it. Amazon has it second hand.

The physical and the abstract are lovers…

What’s in a name? Psychologists are studying the power of metaphor and are starting to wonder if a rose by any other name really would smell as sweet…

Drawing on philosophy and linguistics, cognitive scientists have begun to see the basic metaphors that we use all the time not just as turns of phrase, but as keys to the structure of thought. By taking these everyday metaphors as literally as possible, psychologists are upending traditional ideas of how we learn, reason, and make sense of the world around us. The result has been a torrent of research testing the links between metaphors and their physical roots, with many of the papers reading as if they were commissioned by Amelia Bedelia, the implacably literal-minded children’s book hero. Researchers have sought to determine whether the temperature of an object in someone’s hands determines how “warm” or “cold” he considers a person he meets, whether the heft of a held object affects how “weighty” people consider topics they are presented with, or whether people think of the powerful as physically more elevated than the less powerful.

What they have found is that, in fact, we do. Metaphors aren’t just how we talk and write, they’re how we think.

[...]

Our instinctive, literal-minded metaphorizing can make us vulnerable to what seem like simple tweaks to our physical environment, with ramifications for everything from how we build polling booths to how we sell cereal. And at a broader level it reveals just how much the human body, in all its particularity, shapes the mind, suggesting that much of what we think of as abstract reasoning is in fact a sometimes awkward piggybacking onto the mental tools we have developed to govern our body’s interactions with its physical environment. Put another way, metaphors reveal the extent to which we think with our bodies.

“The abstract way we think is really grounded in the concrete, bodily world much more than we thought,” says John Bargh, a psychology professor at Yale and leading researcher in this realm. (Boston Globe)

It is said that the tactile system is the building block of human development.

So then…

Is an elephant simply an elephant?

What is the significance of a crescent?

Do symbols physically change us?

Examples of societal metaphors will be welcomed in the comments and posted for display and contemplation…

h/t: AL Daily

Guinness is a Christian drink

Thursday marks Guinness’ 250th birthday:

As a Christian Guinness had a deep social conscience. He was concerned for others and as he knew of Jesus’ love for the least, so he saw his role as a follower of Jesus to care for others too. Of primary concern for Arthur was the widespread drunkenness among his fellow Irishmen. At that time the primary alcoholic beverages of choice were whiskey and gin, both of which were cheap and high in alcoholic content. This meant getting drunk was extremely easy. Arthur’s heart was grieved by the social ills that drunkenness had created and so he prayed that God would provide a solution.

…and so, a beer ministry was born.

Here’s a book review with a few more pints on the subject.

As you were…