Editing matters. There is an article by Chauncey Devega at Salon on June 30, 2023 now titled “Far beyond simple narcissism”: Why Donald Trump can’t simply keep quiet – even when facing prison.
But originally, as shown above, the word quiet was misspelled as quite, and also can be seen by looking at the URL.
Ben Folds is a singer-songwriter, who once fronted an alternative rock trio ironically named the Ben Folds Five. In 2019 he published a memoir titled A Dream About Lightning Bugs: A life of music and cheap lessons. I have just enjoyed reading that book, particularly his advice on songwriting and then editing in the chapter titled Follow the Brown that begins on page 254. Starting with the second paragraph, he says:
“….The most common question I’m asked about songwriting is whether the words or music come first. And that’s a reasonable question. Hell, I ask my songwriter friends the same thing. We all want to know what the spark was. What was the first syllable the writer uttered before the musical sentence was complete? What stuck to the page first? For me, it’s almost always music. I believe my subconscious clues me in to my feelings by expressing them abstractly through music – a few notes, a musical sentence, that I don’t yet understand. I will follow the music to the edge of my lyrical comfort zone, because I firmly believe the music is about something and that’s for me to decipher. Often, the music fools me into writing something I’d rather not have revealed lyrically.
The spark of a song can come at the oddest time. Maybe at a stoplight, a meeting, or in bed at 4 A.M. For me, there’s usually a subtle glow in the air just before the notes start to come. A sense that something is around the corner. Like the farm animals in a disaster movie right before an earthquake, who seem to know what’s coming before the humans do, It feels the way light often looks at ‘magic hour,’ before sunset, when suddenly it seems that anywhere you point the camera will make a good picture. That’s the kind of feeling that tells me to watch for some music. It’s coming soon.
If freestyling onstage teaches us that you can always turn on the faucet and that some kind of music will always flow, then songwriting in solitude confirms that the water can sometimes flow muddy brown. Non-potable melody. You have to let it run for a while, until it begins to run clear. Yes, it hurts to hear the brown ideas coming from the center of your soul, but you don’t have to show them to anybody. Don’t let brown get you down. Here’s a common bit of advice I’ve heard from every songwriter I’ve ever met: Just keep moving.
I personally do not believe there’s such a thing as writer’s block. It’s just that we don’t like everything that comes out. When our self-judgment takes over, it shames us into submission and we shut off the faucet. We say we have no ideas. No. We have ideas, but we aren’t willing to fess up to how bad they might be. But, really, who gives a damn? Own them. They suck, and they came from you. Fine. That’s not a crime, that’s normal. Take it easy on yourself. Remember that you can always write something, it’s just that sometimes it’s shitty. Let it be so! And then follow that brown until it runs clear.
A great musician and producer named Pat Leonard told me that it’s important to know when to send your inner editor away. His advice is another version of my faucet metaphor. Maybe it works better for you. When you’re creating, make a deal with your inner editor – that judgmental but necessary part of your psyche that keeps telling you what sucks. Tell this trigger-happy editor in your mind that you need them to step out of the room while you create. You need to be free to follow all ideas, bad and good. You need to create with impunity – alone. However! The other half of the deal is that the editor gets to come back the next day – with a chain saw. Your editor will get to go to town on what you’ve written. The editor may even throw the whole song in the trash. But not now. Now you must create.”
His advice also applies to speechwriting. On March 23, 2015 I blogged about how Writer’s block is like getting your car stuck in mud up to the axles.
Some writers use a percentage from a survey of the United States to represent the whole world. On February 3, 2014 I blogged about Busting a myth – that 75% of people in the world fear public speaking. There is a two-inch thick book from 2019 by Joseph Henrich titled The WEIRDEST People in the World: How the west became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous. Chapter 1 on WEIRD Psychology opens with the following:
“Who are you?
Perhaps you are WEIRD, raised in a society that is Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. If so, you’re likely rather psychologically peculiar. Unlike much of the world today, and most people who have ever lived, we WEIRD people are highly individualistic, self- obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist, and analytical. We focus on ourselves – our attributes, accomplishments, and aspirations – over our relationships and social roles. We aim to be ‘ourselves’ across contexts and see inconsistencies in others as hypocrisy rather than flexibility. Like everyone else, we are inclined to go along with our peers and authority figures; but, we are less willing to conform to others when this conflicts with our own beliefs, observations, and preferences. We see ourselves as unique beings, not as nodes in a social network that stretches out through space and back in time. When acting, we prefer a sense of control and the feeling of making our own choices.
When reasoning, WEIRD people tend to look for universal categories and rules with which to organize the world, and mentally project straight lines to understand patterns and anticipate trends. We simplify complex phenomena by breaking them down into discrete constituents and assigning properties or abstract categories to these components – whether by imagining types of particles, pathogens, or personalities. We often miss the relationships between the parts or the similarities between phenomena that don’t fit nicely into our categories. That is, we know a lot about individual trees but often miss the forest.
WEIRD people are also particularly patient and often hardworking. Through potent self-regulation, we can defer gratification – in financial rewards, pleasure, and security – well into the future in exchange for discomfort and uncertainty in the present. In fact, WEIRD people sometimes take pleasure in hard work and find the experience purifying.
Paradoxically, and despite our strong individualism and self-obsession, WEIRD people tend to stick to impartial rules or principles and can be quite trusting, honest, fair, and cooperative toward strangers or anonymous others. In fact, relative to most populations, we WEIRD people show relatively less favoritism toward our friends, families, co-ethnics, and local communities than other populations do. We think nepotism is wrong, and fetishize abstract principles over context, practicality, relationships, and expediency.
Emotionally, WEIRD people are often racked by guilt as they fail to live up to their culturally inspired, but largely self-imposed, standards and aspirations. In most non-WEIRD societies, shame – not guilt – dominates people’s lives. People experience shame when they, their relatives, or even their friends fail to live up to the standards imposed on them by their communities. Non-WEIRD populations might, for example, ‘lose face’ in front of the judging eyes of others when their daughter elopes with someone outside their social network. Meanwhile, WEIRD people might feel guilty for taking a nap instead of hitting the gym even though this isn’t an obligation and no one will know. Guilt depends on one’s own standards and self-evaluation, while shame depends on societal standards and public judgement.
These are just a few examples, the tip of that psychological iceberg I mentioned, which includes aspects of perception, memory, attention, reasoning, motivation, decision-making, and moral judgment. But, the questions I hope to answer in this book are: How did WEIRD populations become so psychologically peculiar? Why are they different?”
We can use two surveys of social fears to see how different the U. S. is from other countries. On June 23, 2009 I blogged about how You are not alone: fear of public speaking affects one in five Americans. That post discussed an article from 2008 by A. M. Ruscio titled Social Fears and Social Phobias in the United States: Results from the National Comorbidity Survey Replication. And on August 15, 2012 I blogged about how Surveys show that public speaking isn’t feared by the majority of adults in nine developed and 11 developing countries. That post discussed another article from 2010 by Dan J. Stein et al titled Subtyping Social Anxiety Disorder in Developed and Developing Countries. The nine developed countries are Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United States. The eleven developing countries are Brazil, Bulgaria, China, Colombia, India, Lebanon, Mexico, Nigeria, Romania, South Africa, and Ukraine.
The horizontal bar chart shown above compares a dozen fears for the United States with those from eleven developing countries, which are considerably lower. The most common fear, public speaking/performance (aka stage fright) is 21.2% for the U.S. but only 9.4% for eleven developing countries.
Another horizontal bar chart shown above compares the ratios of percentages for those fears. The largest ratio of 4.62 is for Going to Parties, followed by four with a ratio of about 3.24. Then there is a ratio of 2.77 for Entering an Occupied Room. Public Speaking/Performance is one of another five fears with a ratio of around 2.23. Finally, there is a ratio of 1.78 for Using Public Bathroom.
John Zimmer’s Manner of Speaking blog on March 14, 2023 hasa post titled Quotes for Public Speakers (No. 350) – Rudyard Kipling. Kipling said that:
“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind”
A search at Google Books reveals that, according to page 526 of Robert Andrews’s 1997 book Famous Lines: A Columbia Dictionary of Familiar Quotations it came from a speech on February 14, 1923 which was quoted in the London Times on February 15, 1923.
A cartoon about the Age of Drugs came from an October 10, 1900 Puck magazine at the Library of Congress.
At the Gem State Patriot News blog on June 25, 2023 there is a post by Dr. John Livingston titled City Planning is Not Settled Science. His third paragraph says:
“The father of modern-day urban planning was John Freidman. He is revered in departments of urban planning across our country. His modern-day humanistic philosophy was centered around ‘social justice’. They are very different from Biblical Justice or theories of Entitlement ‘Equality’. He stated before his death in 2019 that they are grounded in Eastern mysticism and Chinese Marxist economic theories.”
But a quick Google search reveals an article by Stan Paul at
the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs on June 13, 2017 titled John
Friedmann, the ‘Father of Urban Planning,’ dies at 91. Dr. Livingston got both his
name and year of death wrong. On November 2, 2022 I blogged about how Unwillingness
to proofread runs deep. And on September 11, 2020 I blogged about Editing tips
for speechwriters and other writers. And back on October 4, 2017 I blogged about how What you write is not finished until you have proofread it.
Also, in his next to last paragraph, Dr. Livingston said:
“As Milton Freidman wisely opined ‘The road to hell ( with transportation nodes, and access portals to the green belt through neighborhoods—jl.) is paved with good but misinformed intentions.’ ”
Again, a Google search would reveal he again had swapped the first i and e in the last name, and meant to refer to the famous economist Milton Friedman.
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On August 13, 2021 I blogged about Donald J. Trump’s escalating language, and how he went from calling his opponents Radical Democrats, then Socialist Democrats, and finally Communist Democrats.
An article by Ed Mazza at HuffPost (via YahooNews) on June 15, 2023 is titled Trump names a baffling new enemy in latest unhinged all-caps rant:
“REALLY BIG FUNDRAISING, EVEN GREATER POLLS SINCE THE RADICAL LEFT INDICTMENT HOAX WAS INITIATED BY THE MISFITS, MUTANTS, MARXISTS, & COMMUNISTS! THANK YOU!!!”
It is not clear which mutants he meant. Was it the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT), or the X-Men from Marvel Comics? The Donald seems to be in a confused state (perhaps Arizona).
An image of four Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was adapted from this one at Wikimedia Commons.
On June 18, 2023 OceanGate’s submersible Titan, which was carrying five people on a dive down to the site of the Titantic, imploded and sank – killing all aboard. There is a Wikipedia page about it titled 2023 Titan submersible incident. An article by Tony Perrottet in the Smithsonian on June 2019 is titled A deep dive into the plans to take tourists to the ‘Titanic’. There is a historical time line in another article by Dinah Voyles Pulver at USA Today on June 22, 2023 titled Patents, lawsuits, safety concerns – then tragedy. A timeline of OceanGate’s Titan sub. An NPR article by Rachel Treisman on June 23, 2023 is titled James Cameron says the Titan passengers probably knew the submersible was in trouble.
OceanGate removed their web site. But their boastful archived OceanGate web page about Titan says:
“Titan 5-Person Submersible | 4,000 meters
Titan is a Cyclops-class manned submersible designed to take five people to depths of 4,000 meters (13,123 feet) for site survey and inspection, research and data collection, film and media production, and deep sea testing of hardware and software. Through the innovative use of modern materials, Titan is lighter in weight and more cost efficient to mobilize than any other deep diving submersible. A combination of ground-breaking engineering and off-the-shelf technology gives Titan a unique advantage over other deep diving subs; the proprietary Real Time Hull Health Monitoring (RTM) systems provides an unparalleled safety feature that assesses the integrity of the hull throughout every dive. The use off-the-shelf components helped to streamline the construction, and makes it simple to operate and replace parts in the field.
Paired with a patented, integrated launch and recovery platform, Titan is easy to operate in varying sea states using a local appropriately sized ship for the project. In coastal waters this means we do not need a large support ship with a crane or A-frame.
Real-Time Health Monitoring
The most significant innovation is the proprietary real-time hull health monitoring (RTM) system. Titan is the only manned submersible to employ an integrated real-time health monitoring system. Utilizing co-located acoustic sensors and strain gauges throughout the pressure boundary, the RTM system makes it possible to analyze the effects of changing pressure on the vessel as the submersible dives deeper, and accurately assess the integrity of the structure. This onboard health analysis monitoring system provides early warning detection for the pilot with enough time to arrest the descent and safely return to surface.”
Obviously the hull health monitoring system (RTM) did not perform properly. Yet another article by Pallab Ghosh at BBC News on June 23, 2023 is titled Titan investigation: How will they find out what happened? Analysis of the origin and cause of failure would rely on examination of the failed hull fragments, which may or may not be eventually recovered. There is a detailed article by E. S. Greenhalgh and M. J. Hiley from 2007 titled Fractography of polymer composites: current status and future issues.
The schematic of Titan was adapted from this one at Wikimedia Commons.
UPDATE June 28, 2023
There is a June 27, 2023 New York Magazine article by David Pogue titled What I learned on a Titanic sub expedition. And there is a June 28, 2023 article at ABC News by Meredith Deliso titled Debris from Titan submersible brought ashore after catastrophic implosion.
On May 30, 2023 I posted about Are there blogs written by professional speechwriters?, and mentioned David Murray’s Writing Boots blog. Recently, on June 1, 2023 he had an angry post titled A Day in the Rigorously Meaningless Life of One Corporate CEO. It was on an article by Payton Kirol originally at Fortune on May 21, 2021 titled The 34-year-old CEO of P. F. Chang’s wakes up at 4 a.m. and runs 8 miles every day. Here’s the Wall Street wunderkind’s daily routine. That Chief Executive Officer (CEO) is Damola Adamolekun. He gets up at 4:30 AM and works for thirteen and a half hours, till 6:00 PM. Mr. Murray retorts:
“I’ve run eight miles many days, training for long races. I’m not smarter, not sharper, not more energetic for doing so. Promise.”
In a follow-up post on June 6, 2023, titled A Day in the Sustainably Happy Life of A(nother) CEO, David described his more reasonable ten-hour day from 7:00 AM to 5:00 PM. He strikes a better balance between work and life.
Mr. Kirol’s article opened with Adamolekun’s statement that:
"My life is my work. My work is my life."
But then his article said:
“Although Adamolekun has never prioritized finding a work-life balance, he acknowledges that work impacts people differently. ‘It's an individual thing,’ he says, adding that you should separate the two if work is stressful. That’s why he encourages employees to build in ‘buffers,’ taking a day off on a Tuesday or Wednesday since weekends are usually busy at the restaurant due to higher demand.”
The second post in my blog, on May 26, 2008 is titled “Rocket Science” for Speech Topics. It discussed the NASA Work/Life Navigator, a four-page newsletter for which you can still find downloads of pdf files dated March 2004 to July 2006
The image of scales was adapted from this one at Openclipart.
Of course not. In 2008 there was a book by Madison Cavanaugh titled The One-Minute Cure, and there also is a second edition from 2021. But my title obeys Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, for which the Wikipedia page says:
“Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”
A scathing article by Harriet Hall at Science-Based Medicine on June 16, 2019 is titled Can a One-Minute Cure Really Heal Virtually All Diseases? Harriet says that Cavanaugh was recommending taking 35% food grade hydrogen peroxide, starting with one drop in a glass of distilled water three times a day and working up to 25 drops. What really happens is:
“Hydrogen peroxide is converted to water and oxygen in the stomach and the oxygen is burped out, not absorbed into the body. It does not raise body oxygen levels. The amount (a few drops added to a glass of distilled water) is negligible; adding this amount of 35% hydrogen peroxide to water doesn’t even bring it up to the level of the 3% solution sold as a topical disinfectant.”
On June 8, 2023 Madison Cavanaugh got her own page at the Encyclopedia of American Loons.
The cartoon was colorized from this one at Openclipart.
At Medium on June 15, 2023 there is an article by Arman N. Chowdhury titled Pros and Cons of Toastmasters Public Speaking Club. He gives three of each:
PRO
Place to practice public speaking
Like minds to evolve with
Different paths [Pathways program]
CON
Feelings hold a lot of importance
Too delivery focused
Non-savvy evaluators [in small clubs]
He suggests that you go to a few different clubs, because some are not properly run (like in the cartoon shown above).
The image was cropped from a Puck magazine at the Library of Congress from back in June 29, 1904.
Today there is an article at NPR by Emily Olson and Barbara Sprunt titled Jack Smith, special counsel in classified documents case defends his work. It contains the full text of his less than three-minute speech on the indictment of former president Trump, which also can be found here at C-SPAN.
On South Cole Road in Boise there is a restaurant called O Crab Cajun Seafood and Bar. As their Cajun name suggests, and the menu shows, they are masters of seafood boils and fried seafood (baskets and po’ boy sandwiches). But their menu also has a couple of Italian pasta dishes listed: seafood marinara and Cajun shrimp alfredo.
I have been getting tabloid mailings with their monthly menus which have added other genres. One had Japanese (special sushi rolls or ramen). Another had Hawaiian (poke bowls). So far there are four genres, as shown above by a Venn diagram.
Perhaps next month they will go Mexican - with seafood tacos and burritos, or Greek - with gyros, or Indian with curries.
Yesterday I drove by Capital Auto Body at 5373 Emerald Street in Boise. Their sign says “All Foreign & Domestic.” Long ago the Car Talk radio show on NPR had joked about repair shops saying that we specialize in all makes, foreign and domestic.
The location for O Crab used to be a McGrath’s Fish House, which closed in 2020. McGrath’s once had 21 restaurants, but now just has two in Salem, Oregon and Vancouver, Washington.
There are many different ways to plan a presentation, including outlining, mind mapping, and storyboarding. In 2021 Dan Roam added another with his book The Pop-Up Pitch (The Two-Hour Creative Sprint to the Most Persuasive Presentation of Your Life). A description on his web page claims:
“If you’re busy but you want to create a great presentation, I wrote this book for you.
This whole book is about how to spend two hours creating ten pages that will transform your audience in seven minutes, no matter what story you need to tell.
Your pop-up pitch combines clear words and simple pictures that evoke specific emotions, so that your story is enjoyable to hear, memorable to see, and inspires the action you need.
The next time you have an idea to pitch, try this story line. It works.”
Toastmasters typically give five-to-seven-minute speeches, so Dan’s approach may appeal to them.
In his book Dan describes two tools, which are THE VISUAL DECODER and THE 10-PAGE PITCH TEMPLATE. Templates for both can be downloaded at his web page. A redrawn version of the Visual Decoder is shown above. It fits on both sides of a single sheet of paper. You fill in each page by drawing a picture. Pages 55 to 63 illustrate how to do this with the example of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.
The more detailed 10-page pitch template is as follows:
P1 TITLE: WHO & WHAT
Title Page:
Give your pitch a Who & What title.
(Emotion = CLARITY)
P2 OUR COMMON GROUND
Our Common Ground:
Establish an authentic connection to your audience and the issues that concern them Show them you know them, for real.
(Emotion = TRUST)
P3 THE COMING PROBLEM
The Coming Problem:
State the facts and numbers that might be so scary that no one really wants to look at them.
(Emotion = FEAR)
P4 AN EMOTIONAL WIN
An Emotional Win:
Paint a picture of what it might feel like to have already solved the problem.
(Emotion = Hope)
P5 THE FALSE HOPE
The False Hope:
Admit that the hoped-for simple solution won’t really work at all.
(Emotion = SOBERING REALITY)
P6 AN AUDACIOUS NEW REALITY
A Fairly Audacious Reality:
State the bold alternative; the slightly crazy yet potentially viable solution that just might, with courage and commitment, work.
(Emotion = GUSTO)
P7 WE CAN DO THIS FOR REAL
We Can Do This, For Real:
Walk through your bold alternative with a grounding sense of real possibility; get into a few key details to show there’s no real reason to fear them.
(Emotion = COURAGE)
P8 CALL TO ACTION
Our Call To Action:
List the five things that need to get done first to make it happen. Take personal responsibility for two. Request help with the other three.
(Emotion = COMMITMENT)
P9 EARLY BENEFITS
Early Benefits:
State at least two near-term measurable benefits that getting started now will trigger.
(Emotion = REWARD)
P10 THE LONG WIN
The Long Win:
Close with an unexpected giant win that could truly come to pass once the new solution becomes the new normal.
(Emotion = TRUE ASPIRATION)
The three core components are the Beginning (P2, P3, P4), the Middle (P5, P6, P7) and the End (P8, P9, P10).
There is a thirty-minute YouTube video by Kelly Kingman at Kingman Ink titled VBQ O1: Dan Roam Explains the 10-Page Pitch Template.
I haven’t tried his 10-Page Pitch Template yet.
Some people think that you can find underground water by waving around a y-shaped rod (dowsing), as shown above. The Wikipedia article say that:
“Dowsing is a type of divination employed in attempts to locate ground water, buried metals or ores, gemstones, oil, claimed radiations (radiesthesia), gravesites, malign ‘earth vibrations’ and many other objects or materials without the use of a scientific apparatus.”
More generally, another Wikipedia article says that Divination is:
“the attempt to gain insight into a question or situation by way of an occultic, standardized process or ritual.”
There is an article by Jonathan Jarry at the McGill Office for Science and Society on March 17, 2023 humorously titled Dowsing: Dowse It Work? Seriously his answer is no, it does not. Jonathan mentions Leroy Bull, who appears in an article on August 24, 2016 at the Encyclopedia of American Loons titled Tommy Hanson, Leroy Bull & Craig Elliot. Mr. Jarry also links to a BBC Newsnight article about a fake bomb detector. That topic also is discussed in a Wikipedia article on the ADE 651.
There is another 21-page historical article by John D. Norton titled Dowsing: The instabilities of evidential competition which is chapter 13 from his book titled The Large-Scale Structure of Inductive Inference.
Still another article by Michael A. Easter and Angi M. Christensen at the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin on January 2, 2022 is titled Forensic Spotlight: Dowsing for Human Remains – Considerations for Investigators.
The image of a dowser came from one at Wikimedia Commons.
This week I bought my third GPS. My decision was a satisfice, a word I’ve discussed previously, and is defined as follows:
“Satisfice: a combination of satisfy and suffice; used to describe real decision making where an optimum isn’t possible since it takes both time and money to obtain needed information.”
Back on June 17, 2017 I blogged about How is a car GPS like a razor? In that post I described buying my first GPS – a TomTom (from Big Lots) back in 2011 for about $75. TomTom charged for map updates, just like replacing razor blades. Finally they told me my obsolete model couldn’t even hold a map for the entire country.
In 2017 I replaced it with a $100 refurbished Garmin Nuvi 67LM with a larger screen and free lifetime map updates. But lately the touch screen became finnicky, and last week it would not let me press GO to accept my destination.
So, I went on Amazon and bought a second refurbished Garmin, a Drive 52 (shown above) for $75, with free lifetime map updates for both the US and Canada. I stuck with Garmin because I already had a perfect mount for my dash, and the ‘beanbag’ mount for my wife’s vehicle or any rental (also shown above).
The screen on my new GPS has a 5” diagonal, which is acceptable. You can buy others with larger screens like 6” or 8”, and other features like voice command, live traffic and weather, etc. If I used a GPS every day for commuting, then I might be willing to spend $300. But I am retired, and only use it occasionally on trips to unfamiliar places.
A sticker on the front of the screen said “Welcome! This
product is ready to use.” That was a lie. When I switched it on, first there
was a message that the battery was low. When I plugged it into my iMac to
charge, the Garmin Express software wanted me to download the latest version.
And then it told me there was an updated map to download - which took three and
a half hours. Even after all that time the battery wasn’t charged fully! I added a 32Gb microSD memory card to the slot on the back of the GPS. The lifetime update subscription expires when the new map download will no longer fit in the available memory in the GPS.
Similarly, earlier this year I bought my wife a 9th generation iPad for her birthday. There is a bewildering assortment of iPad models: iPad Mini, iPad (9th and 10th generations), iPad Air, and iPad Pro. The most affordable one was capable of doing what she wanted.
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