“Being is not a steady state but an occulting one: we are all of us a succession of stillnesses blurring into motion on the wheel of action, and it is in those spaces of black between the pictures that we find the heart of the mystery in which we are never allowed to rest.” ~ Russell Hoban – Fremder

It’s Russell Hoban’s 85th birthday today and I celebrated it by writing this quote on a piece of yellow paper and taping it to the side of the large white rock that my city was named after. All around the world, pieces of yellow paper with quotes from his books were left in other public places – cafe tables, bookshops, park benches, telephone booths, train stations or anywhere the birthday celebrant deemed appropriate. The SA4QE (Slickman A4 Quotation Event) website lists 350 quotes that have been left, on his birthday, in big cities and small towns in 14 countries since 2002.  I am still the only Canadian representative listed on their site, but I know at least one other Canadian who leaves the yellow paper anonymously for the simple joy of having done so.

For a long time now, I’ve kept my camera, my flash drives and my noise-cancelling headphones in my backpack, which resides under my desk here at home, so it’s at hand for road trips. I use it as an auxilliary desk drawer.

I also keep doubles of my computer power cables, adapters, USB, ethernet and audio cables in the backpack so I can ready my laptop for the drive to the airport in the time it takes to unplug it and pack it away. Since the camera, drives and headphones are stored in there already, I’m less likely to leave them behind.

Jumping up and leaving town is such an expected part of my everyday reality, this routine seems eminently logical …

Until this morning, in the early days of Trooper’s traditional winter break, when I paused for a confused moment wondering where to put my camera.

My Dad, a brilliant sculptor, used to tell people that he simply carved away everything that didn’t look like what he’d set out to create. Watching him work, you’d swear he did just that – uncovering animals and people that had been waiting in the wood for his chisel to free them.

I joked with Monty on Saturday night that I was hoping to use Dad’s approach to finish my submission for this year’s Three-Minute Film Festival. My rough cut had timed in at over an hour. I simply needed to carve away all but three minutes of that.

Monty laughed, but I could see the look of concern in his eyes.
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From the Amy Wallace story:

The rejection of hard-won knowledge is by no means a new phenomenon. In 1905, French mathematician and scientist Henri Poincaré said that the willingness to embrace pseudo-science flourished because people “know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether illusion is not more consoling.” Decades later, the astronomer Carl Sagan reached a similar conclusion: Science loses ground to pseudo-science because the latter seems to offer more comfort. “A great many of these belief systems address real human needs that are not being met by our society,” Sagan wrote of certain Americans’ embrace of reincarnation, channeling, and extraterrestrials. “There are unsatisfied medical needs, spiritual needs, and needs for communion with the rest of the human community.”

Looking back over human history, rationality has been the anomaly. Being rational takes work, education, and a sober determination to avoid making hasty inferences, even when they appear to make perfect sense. Much like infectious diseases themselves — beaten back by decades of effort to vaccinate the populace — the irrational lingers just below the surface, waiting for us to let down our guard.

UPDATE: FactCheck.org article: “Inoculation Misinformation - Claims that the “swine flu” vaccine is dangerous range from seriously overblown to flat-out false.”

I’ve just received an email warning about the dangers of the H1N1 Vaccine. You may have received it too. That’s why I’m writing this.

I urge you all to take the time to read this story in the current Wired Magazine called “ An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All”

It’s a well-reasoned and heavily researched story about vaccines in general and the H1N1 vaccine in particular. Usually I’d say that folks should make their own choices and not care what those choices are  -  but this story has convinced me that in this case it really can’t work that way. If enough people refuse to take the H1N1 vaccine – it will put everyone else in their community at risk.

Here’s one of many key quotes from the Wired article:

The frightening implications of this kind of anecdote were illustrated by a 2002 study published in The Journal of Infectious Diseases. Looking at 3,292 cases of measles in the Netherlands, the study found that the risk of contracting the disease was lower if you were completely unvaccinated and living in a highly vaccinated community than if you were completely vaccinated and living in a relatively unvaccinated community. Why? Because vaccines don’t always take. What does that mean? You can’t minimize your individual risk unless your herd, your friends and neighbors, also buy in.

By contrast, here’s the Wiki page on Russell Blaylock, who wrote the H1N1 email that was forwarded to me. And here’s an excerpt from that page:

Blaylock has asserted, among other things, that behind the US drug problem was a “nefarious program created in the former Soviet Union that exceeds even the far-reaching imaginations of Hollywood writers”. The drug problem, he writes, would weaken the resistance of Western Society to Soviet invasion, undermine religion (which he calls ‘the foundation of Western stability and morality’), target schools, harm the work force and work ethic, make the youth “unable to resist collectivism”, and create a “totalitarian mindset within the United States government”. He implicates Fidel Castro, Nikita Kruschev, Leonid Brezhnev, organized crime syndicates, and their American “leftist accomplices” in the formation of US drug culture.

Blaylock implies that the Soviet program was linked to crack-cocaine, fentanyl, ecstasy and methamphetamine, and that it was responsible for “an epidemic of hepatitis, AIDS, venereal diseases and highly resistant tuberculosis”. He accuses the US media and the US government of knowing about the Soviet plot, but failing to expose it. As part of his evidence, he quotes from the “Communist Manual of Instructions of Psychological Warfare”, purportedly by Lavrenti Beria. However, many people have doubted the authenticity and authorship of the work, including the FBI.

The Wired story is not as short and exciting as the anti-vaccine email that I received tonight, but it should be required reading for us all.

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof”

~ Marcello Truzzi

I was just reading about Iran again. I realized that, in response to an email from Dik Silver yesterday, I could almost spell Ahmadinejad and Khamenei without checking Huffington Post, where I still spend an inordinate amount of time. I have said the name “Ahmadinejad” out loud several times and think I pronounce it correctly. I am reading “Infinite Jest”, mostly because John Gruber of Daring Fireball said it was his “favorite novel ever”, and I’m trying to not think about the fact that its author, David Foster Wallace, recently hung himself after suffering from severe depression. The book is 1078 pages long and I’m currently on page 71 – so there will be another 1007 pages of slight discomfort with Wallace’s often black humor. It also trips me up a bit that he says “like” all the time. As in: “He uses the word “like”, like, inappropriately”. He also doesn’t use paragraphs which makes for large, intense, blocks of text. I listened to Merlin Mann’s talk on doing creative work this morning. He’s a funny guy but his only real points were that I should get started and not be afraid to suck. Good advice. I didn’t start then though. First I paid a bill. Fedex charged me a $10.50 “Advancement Fee” for paying $3.38 to Canada Customs for taxes on a $25.00 guitar pick order. That’s what the lady told me when I phoned to ask what the $10.50 was for. And I don’t have the time (or inclination) to write about the US audio/video company that wouldn’t take my Canadian VISA and didn’t like my PayPal and eventually cancelled my headphone amplifier order. Also this morning. I wrote to Paul Tobin thanking him for his CD and called the lady that had called Red Robinson who had called me because the lady knew another lady who wanted to give me a portrait that my Dad had done of me in the seventies. She was very nice and particularly understanding. I also called the roofer who put plywood where my skylights were about a month ago. I called last week and his wife told me she picked them up a week before that. This morning I said something about maybe getting the new, opening, skylights sometime before the end of summer. She agreed that would be a good idea. I forwarded off a couple of pieces of email for clarification after discovering there is, apparently, a new person who seems to be representing us in some manner at our booking agency. I made some notes containing what I know will seem like stupid questions and saved them to my desktop, from where I’ll retrieve them at a later date when seeking further enlightenment. I had to re-calk the sink in our upstairs bathroom this morning because the DAP Kitchen and Bathroom sealant didn’t seal when I did it last week. Today I used a new product that jammed-up in the tube two-thirds of the way around the sink and refused to extrude any further caulk. I probed it with a 2″ finishing nail and forced small blobs onto my finger, which I then applied piecemeal to the seam. I also finished, laying on my stomach on the bathroom floor, the tile caulk replacement job in a spot that I had missed down under the cupboards. My Trooper email didn’t work this morning, but before I could ask about it, our Webmeister had already jumped in and taken care of it. Our lighting Director sent an email about flight scheduling and holiday time that made my eyes glaze over and my head start to ache and I was only slightly relieved that his questions were not directed to me, since I will be asked to weigh in with my opinion at some point. Probably after my holiday is over.

… and have a great 2009!

Someone has an autographed photo of me for sale on eBay. “This is not a Preprint or Fake – 100% authentic” it says. Except that it’s not my signature.