The Idaho Freedom Foundation made a thoughtless proposal to completely eliminate the Idaho Commission for Libraries

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is an article by Brett Farruggia at the Idaho Freedom Foundation on November 21, 2025 titled Ending Bureaucratic Excess in Idaho. It also was posted on November 22, 2025 at the Gem State Patriot News blog. It has a totally  thoughtless proposal – to completely eliminate the Idaho Commission for Libraries:

 

“Further savings can come from eliminating unconstitutional agencies that promote DEI ideology such as the Hispanic Commission ($557,283) and the Library Commission ($6,947,300).”

 

Back on September 1, 2025 the Idaho Freedom Foundation had an article titled Public Recommendations to Idaho’s DOGE Task Force to Increase Government Efficiency which listed the Idaho Commission for Libraries at #5 under recommended Agency Eliminations, but left off the DEI claim.

 

The Idaho Commission for Libraries is responsible for Libraries Linking Idaho (LiLI) which has databases with magazines and newspapers for public libraries in the state. It’s our public utility for information - a critical set of research tools for keeping the public informed. Back on February 23, 2020 I blogged about Finding speech topics and doing research. LiLI databases include, among others these 26 from EBSCOhost:

 

Academic Search Premier

Business Source Premier

Computer Source

Consumer Health Complete

ERIC – Educational Resource Information Center

GreenFILE

Health Source: Consumer Edition

Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition

History Reference Source

Legal Collection

Literary Reference Source

MAS Ultra (for high school students)

MasterFILE Premier

MEDLINE

Middle Search Plus (for middle school students)

Military and Government Collection

Newspaper Source Plus

Primary Search (for elementary school students)

Professional Development Collection

Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection

Publication Finder

Religion and Philosophy Collection

Small Business Source

Teacher Reference Center

TOPICsearch

Vocational and Career Collection

 

Based on a state population of 2,032,120 that expenditure ($6,947,300) is only $3.42 per person – and a tiny part of the overall budget for Idaho.

 

Mr. Farruggia has the combination of arrogance and incompetence I have come to expect from the Idaho Freedom Foundation. I suspect he does not know much about what vital services the Commission for Libraries provides.

 

My cartoon was adapted from this one at OpenClipArt.  

 

 

If you only have a hammer, then everything looks like a nail

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Savage Chickens cartoon for November 18, 2025 by Doug Savage is titled The Amazing Hammer and is shown above. It illustrates a proverb Wikipedia terms the Law of the instrument. Some web sites attribute versions of it to Mark Twain:

 

Goodreads - “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail”

 

AZ Quotes – “If your only tool is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.”

 

Quotefancy - “To someone with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

 

At Quote Investigator on May 8, 2014 Garson O’Toole discussed it in an article titled Quote Origin: If Your Only Tool Is A Hammer Then Every Problem Looks Like a Nail. He found no evidence for Mark Twain, and rather found a 1962 version by Abraham Kaplan:

 

“Give a boy a hammer and everything he meets has to be pounded.”

 

There also are a 1964 version by Abraham Maslow:

 

“Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.”

 

and another 1966 version:

 

“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”

 

Update November 23, 2025

 

Adam Savage’s 2019 memoir Every Tool’s a Hammer: Life is what you make it discusses the converse. In Chapter 12 Hammers, Blades, and Scissors, on pages 266 and 267 he writes about his friend, Mark Buck:

 

“He was a man with an aversion for fools and a love of tools. If he walked by your workbench and he saw you looking too long for something in your toolbox, he’d instruct you in an almost solemn tone, like a sifu, ‘Remember, in every tool, there is a hammer.’ What he meant was that every tool can be used for a purpose for which it wasn’t intended, including the most basic of operations, like hammering. He also meant that until you learn to see what tools can do beyond their stated purpose, you can’t quite be a maker. Truer words have rarely been spoken.”

 

 

What if a commencement speech told you to assume the worst?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a brief and humorous book from 2018 by Carl Hiassen titled Assume the Worst: The graduation speech you’ll never hear. Amazon has sample of first eight pages. It’s just 64 double-spaced pages, with hilarious cartoon illustrations by Roz Chast. Here’s a paraphrase from it:

 

 “This commencement address will never be given, because graduation speakers are supposed to offer encouragement and inspiration.

 

That’s not what you need. You need a warning.

 

After an uncommonly long career observing and writing about misbehavior, I have one piece of advice as you launch yourself from college: assume the worst.

 

Based on the last six thousand years of human history, it’s the only sensible way to proceed. Lowering your expectations will inoculate you against serial disappointments. It will also set you up for heart-lifting surprises on those occasions when someone you meet turns out to be unexpectedly honorable, generous and selfless.

 

…. 1. Live each day as if it’s your last.

      As wise and appealing as this might sound, it’s actually terrible advice. If you live every day as if it’s your last, you won’t accomplish a damn thing. You’ll soon run out of money, your car will get repossessed, you’ll be evicted from your apartment, and the person you’re living with will dump you for somebody with a mid-level management job at BrandsMart.

 

…. 2. If you set your mind to it, you can be anything you want to be.

     Total bullshit. Nobody can be absolutely anything they want to be – no matter how hard they wish, pray or try. I wanted to play major-league baseball like Willie Mays but unfortunately, I couldn’t run, catch or hit like Willie Mays. And I tried. Really hard. By eighth grade I’d bagged the whole fantasy and moved on.

 

…. 3. Try to find goodness in everyone you meet.

     Another waste of time. Relationships aren’t supposed to be reclamation projects. The humane qualities of any new acquaintance should be evident in the first five minutes of conversation – ten minutes, tops.

 

…. 4. Don’t be quick to judge others.

     Are you kidding? If you don’t learn how to judge others – and judge fast – you’ll get metaphorically trampled from now until the day you die.

 

…. To sum up.

     Figure out what you’re good at, and get better at it. Along the way, don’t waste your time on people whose decency isn’t apparent when you first meet for a cup of coffee. Be an astute judge of character, and learn to judge quickly.

 

Read the news. Pay attention. Always aspire to act in a way that cancels out someone else’s cruel or stupid behavior.

 

Never stop worrying. Live each day as if your rent is due tomorrow.

 

And always, always be the one who sleeps near the campfire – the one who would make Darwin proud.”

 

My version of the book cover cartoon was assembled by adapting an anvil from Wikimedia Commons and a silhouette from OpenClipArt. 

 

Celebrating a joyful milestone of 3000 blog posts

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I just passed a joyful milestone - 3000 blog posts. My first pair of posts were over eighteen years ago on May 26, 2008. There have been 3,144,713 page views or an overall average of 1,048 per post. The five posts with the highest number of page views are:

 

25,900: October 27, 2009 - The 14 Worst Human Fears in the1977 Book of Lists: where did this data come from?

 

22,300: July 5, 2009 – Two types of speech outlines:speaking and preparation

 

17,200: February 6, 2019 – Is flip-chart a racist term?

 

8,980: December 29, 2011 – How can you easily draw dotted chalk lines on a blackboard?

 

7,490: December 6, 2021 - Most Americans are not terrified of public speaking

 

On July 22, 2024 I had blogged about Celebrating 2,700 blog posts. The first four then were the same as the current ones.

 

The image of a crate came from OpenClipArt.

 

 

Small acts of joy bring big gains in happiness

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is an interesting brief article by Darwin A. Guevarra, Xuhai ‘Orson” Xu, and Emiliana Simon-Thomas in the December 2025 issue of Scientific American titled Small, Easy Acts of Joy Mean Big Gains in Happiness. It describes how there is a free, globally available online resource called the Big Joy Project.

 

“People who sign up for this project receive a daily e-mail or text that includes a link to instructions for a five- to 10-minute micro act, defined as a short, simple activity for building joy. The opening micro act, for example, invites participants to listen to a 42-second audio clip of different people laughing, including the Dalai Lama and Tutu. It’s an uplifting moment designed to elicit a smile or chuckle. The rest of the activities are delivered each day for seven days and include making a gratitude list, doing something kind, reflecting on a core value, feeling loving-kindness (or a state of tenderness and consideration to others), reframing a difficult experience, celebrating another person’s joy and watching an awe-inspiring video….

 

By analyzing responses from 17,598 people from 169 countries and territories, we found that people reported higher emotional well-being, more positive emotions, lower stress, and even modest improvements in sleep quality and physical health.

 

It took surprisingly little time and effort for participants to feel better. Many well-being programs span eight weeks or more, but the Big Joy Project yielded meaningful changes after just one week. And the more micro acts people completed, the more their happiness improved.”

 

The image was modified from this one at OpenClipArt.

 

Two good recent articles about opening a speech

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are two good, brief articles about opening a speech from earlier this year at the web site for the National Speakers Association. One is by Patricia Fripp on April 9, 2025 and titled Your First Thirty Seconds: Arouse Interest in Your Subject. She says:

 

“Transport the audience to a different time and place

 Stories are always a crowd pleaser

 Interesting statistics or little-known facts

 A powerful quotation

 A question”

 

Another is by Mark Sanborn on July 2, 2025 and titled Start Strong: How to Open a Speech the Right Way. He says to:

 

“ 1]  Promise a benefit

   2]  Pique interest

   3]  Relate a personal experience

   4]  Be a contrarian

   5]  Make a challenging statement

   6]  Use humor”

 

The cartoon was adapted from this one at OpenClipArt.

 

 

Finding joy at work

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are some long, excellent publications about finding joy at work. For example, there is a 42-page pdf white paper by Jessica Perlo et al. in 2017 from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) titled IHI Framework for Improving Joy in Work. It describes:

 

“The importance of joy in work (the ‘why’).

 

Four steps leaders can take to improve joy in work (the ‘how’).

 

The IHI Framework for Improving Joy in Work: nine critical components of a system for ensuring a joyful, engaged workforce (the ‘what’).

 

Key change ideas for improving joy in work, along with examples from organizations that helped test them.

 

Measurement and assessment tools for gauging efforts to improve joy in work.”

 

And there is an article by Alex Liu at the Harvard Business Review in July 2019 titled Making Joy a Priority at Work. Another article by Megan Dalla-Camina at Psychology Today on December 12, 2023 is titled 6 Ways to Find More Joy at Work. 

 

And there is a 60-page pdf article by Amanda Cornett and Jeannine Herrick from the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) in July 2024 titled Joy in Work Implementation Guide. On page 8 they mention nine key areas:

 

Physical and psychological safety

Meaning and purpose

Choice and autonomy

Recognition and rewards

Participative management

Camaraderie and teamwork

Daily improvement

Wellness and resilience

 

A section on page 47 about Spreading Joy begins:

 

“Joy deserves to be spread to others. You can create a ripple effect that starts with your team and then spreads to others. Be intentional and plan for how you will spread and scale your efforts. A workplace culture that prioritizes JOY IN WORK will typically use a layered approach continuously thinking through how the implementation steps look differently for SELF (the manager), INDIVIDUAL STAFF, TEAM, and the overall ORGANIZATION. If you’ve been successful with your SELF, STAFF, and TEAM what do you do next to spread it to others and throughout the ORGANIZATION.”

 

The cartoon was cropped from one at OpenClipArt. 

 

 

Aphantasia means not having a mind’s eye

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Via interlibrary loan from the Twin Falls Public Library I got and have been reading a 2025 book by Adam Zeman titled The Shape of Things Unseen: A new science of imagination. There is a Google Books preview to page 43 of it. On pages 13 and 14 he says:

 

“But Keat’s acute sensibility is deeply puzzling to the 2 – 3 percent of us who turn out to lack imagery entirely. The existence of people whose ‘powers’ of visualisation ‘are zero’ was noted by the remarkable Victorian psychologist Sir Edward Galton in the 1880s. But neither Galton himself nor his followers pursued this intriguing lead. In 2015, with colleagues in Edinburgh, I described 21 people who had always lacked a mind’s eye [Adam Zeman, Michela Dewar, and Sergio Della Salla, Cortex, 2105, Volume 73, pages 378 to 380: Lives without imagery – congenital aphantasia], coining the term ‘aphantasia’ to denote this variation in human experience: we had borrowed Aristotle’s term for the capacity to visualize, phantasia, adding an ‘a’ to indicate absence. The public interest that followed came as a huge surprise: after five minutes on breakfast TV discussing the work, I watched emails dropping into my inbox many times every second. One of the most memorable came from a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Blake Ross, the co-creator of Mozilla Firefox, who wrote a feisty Facebook post about his realisation that he was aphatasiac: ‘If I tell you to imagine a beach, you can picture the golden sand and turquoise waves. If I ask for a red triangle, your mind gets to drawing. And mom’s face? Of course. You experience this differently, sure. Some of you see a photorealistic beach, others only a shadowy cartoon, Some of you can make it up, others only ‘see’ a beach they’ve visited. Some of you have to work harder to paint the canvas. Some of you can’t hang onto the canvas for long. But nearly all of you have a canvas. I don’t. I have never visualiszed anything in my entire life. I can’t ‘see’ my father’s face or a bouncing blue ball, my childhood bedroom or the run I went on ten minutes ago. I thought ‘counting sheep’ was a metaphor. I’m 30 years old and I never knew a human could do any of this. And it is blowing my goddamned mind.’

 

Many others wrote along similar lines – one contact wrote of ‘the amazing click of realization we all get when we first heard about it.’ There turned out to be a substantial community of aphantasic folk who had long been trying to articulate this quirk in their psychological nature and were glad of a term with which to describe it.

 

We shall return to the recent discovery of aphantasia. For now, the existence of folk who get by perfectly well without a mind’s eye – indeed in some cases, like Blake Ross’s, without any conscious sensory imagery at all – underlines the huge variability of our imaginative experience and inner lives. This helps to explain my teenage puzzlement at a lively but hazy recollection of the gallery: I have average imagery vividness, but it extends across the sensory spectrum – I can see in my mind’s eye, hear in my mind’s ear, walk with my mind’s legs with reasonable ease. When I recalled the gallery, I precisely imagined being there – the feel of the boards beneath my feet, the still gallery air, the scent of canvas, a certain mood, as well as the look of the paintings. The ability to re-experience events in this richly integrated way – much as we experienced them in the first place – is a key source of our sense that our recollected or imagined memories are ‘true’, even when the fine details prove to be elusive.”

 

There also is a magazine article by Larrissa MacFarquhar in The New Yorker for October 27, 2025 titled Some People Can’t See Mental Images. The Consequences Are Profound. And there is another 20-page pdf article with 165 references by Feiyang Jin, Shen-Mou Hsu, and Yu Li in Vision on September 22, 2024 titled A Systematic Review of Aphantasia: Concept, Measurement, Neural Basis, and Theory Development.

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Yet another article by David J. Wright et al. at Frontiers in Psychology on October 15, 2024 is titled An international estimate of the prevalence of differing visual imagery abilities. They surveyed 3049 people with the results shown above on a bar chart. Just 1.2% had aphantasia. Another 3% had low imagery -  hypophantasia. 89.9% had normal visual imagery, and the other 5.9% had high imagery – hyperphantasia.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A second bar chart shows similar results just for 887 Canadians in that larger sample. Just 1.7% had aphantasia. 3.6% had low imagery -  hypophantasia. 89.1% had normal visual imagery, and the other 5.6% had high imagery – hyperphantasia.

 

Still another article by Rish P. Hinwar and Anthony J. Lambert at Frontiers in Psychology on October 14, 2021 is titled Anauralia: The Silent Mind and Its Association With Aphantasia.

 

The cartoon was assembled using images for an eye and mind from OpenClipArt.

 

 

A Change This manifesto and a book by Laura Huang on trusting your gut feel

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a ChangeThis manifesto by Laura Huang on July 30, 2025 titled Trusting Your Gut Feel: Listening to What Whispers, Not What Screams. It also is presented as a 9-page pdf. In large orange lettering she says that:

 

“Intuition is the process that leads to a final moment of recognition that we call our gut feel.

 

Gut feel is fully and absolutely effective in the right contexts – inadequate, even damaging, in the wrong ones.

 

Gut feel is the result of data plus experience, colliding and combining to create a remarkable reaction, not unlike the nuclear reaction that occurs when atoms collide.”

 

Laura refers to her 2025 book, You Already Know: The science of mastering your intuition. There is a brief Google Books preview ending on page 13.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Her Chapter 3 starting on page 23 is titled Gut Feel Is Sensed in Three Ways and is subtitled Water presents as a liquid, solid or gas. Our gut feel manifests in three forms too. On page 28 there is a 2x2 table, my color version of which is shown above.  It shows her three types of intuition based on priors and prompts: Jolt, Eureka, and Spidey Sense.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Her Chapter 4 starting on page 33 is titled Gut Feel Doesn’t Lie and subtitled For complex and chaotic problems, gut feel can always be trusted.  On page 51 there is a table, my version of which is shown above, describing how to solve four types of problems: simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic.     

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Her Chapter 8 starting on page 101 is titled Emotional: How Do I Feel That?  and subtitled Our embodied gut feel is honed when we perceive where in our bodies we physically feel signals. On page 112 she has a 2x2 chart from another article describing The Emotional Circumplex, my color version of which is shown above.  

 

The cartoon came from OpenClipArt.

 

A gruntled Rat in a cartoon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Pearls Before Swine cartoon by Stephen Pastis for November 10, 2025 has the following dialogue:

 

Pig: Hey, Rat. How you doing today?

 

Rat: I’m pretty gruntled.

 

Pig: What’s that?

 

Rat: It’s the opposite of ‘disgruntled.’ It means ‘happy. Contented.’

 

Pig: Why doesn’t anyone ever use the word?

 

Rat: Because we’re also so busy being @#@&#*@ disgruntled.

 

Pig: I’m gonna start being gruntled.

 

Rat: Good luck.

 

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines gruntled as an adjective meaning in good humor: happy, contented. And it also has another web page about Uncommon Opposites. Turb is an archaic word. Here are twenty dis-words and their root words:

 

Dis-Word            Root Word  

 

disadvantaged   advantaged

disaffected         affected

disallowed          allowed

disappointed      appointed

discerned            cerned

discontented      contented

discovered          covered

disgraced            graced

disgruntled         gruntled

disheartened     heartened

disinfected         infected

dispensed           pensed

displaced            placed

disposed             posed

dissolved            solved

distanced           tanced

distinguished     tinguished

distorted            torted

distressed          stressed

disturbed           turbed

 

Back on June 9, 2013 I blogged about Playing with words like kids and had another version of the graphic shown above. 

 

Brad Meltzer gave the 2024 spring commencement speech at the University of Michigan about making magic

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On May 4, 2024 Brad Meltzer gave the 2024 spring commencement speech at the University of Michigan about making magic. There is an article about that speech by Katie Kelton at the University of Michigan Record on May 4, 2024 titled Commencement speaker shapes how magic provides insight to shape lives.

 

You can watch a 20-minute YouTube video of it titled Brad Meltzer’s 2024 Michigan Commencement Address – Make Magic. And it also is published in a 2025 book by Brad Meltzer titled Make Magic: The book of inspiration you didn’t know you needed. On Page 26 he explains that:

 

“Of course, that sounds absurd – real magic doesn’t exist. But when you ask professional magicians, they’ll tell you there are actually only four types of magic tricks. That’s it. Put aside illusions and escapes – there’s just four types of tricks:

 

1]  You make something appear.

 

2]  You make something disappear.

 

3]  You make two things switch places.

 

4]  And finally, you change one thing into something else.”

 

The cartoon wand was adapted from this one at OpenClipArt.

 

 

A YouTube video ranking almost two-dozen common public speaking tips

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today my Google Alert on public speaking led me to a 25-minute YouTube video from November 7, 2025 by Vinh Giang mistitled Ranking Every Public Speaking & Communication Tip! He ranked each of those 23 from best to worst on a seven-point scale, as I have shown above in a version of the table he developed in the video.

I agree that “Imagine the audience naked” is one of the worst tips. But he ranked “Avoid filler words completely” at the third level from best, while I regard it as some of the worst advice – as is to “Just be yourself.”   

You never could rank EVERY TIP without making a video that ran forever! A thoughtless video title is just as bad as a thoughtless speech title.  

 

There also is another version titled The Best (AND Worst) Public Speaking Advice RANKED. 

A little book about 101 Seeds for Library Joy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

At my local Ada Community Library I found and read a little 2025 book by Rebecca Hass titled 101 Seeds for Library Joy. There is a 16-page pdf sample. And there is an article by Catherine Hollerbach at PublicLibrariesOnline on September 24, 2024 titled Spreading Joy at the Public Library. Six entries from the book are:

 

Page 17:

“WRITE A BULLETED LIST or craft a vision board USING THE PROMPT ‘THERE IS JOY IN…” HANG IT UP OR SAVE IT so you can refer to it often.”

 

Page 30:

“PLAY WITH WORDS. Make a list of words that resonate with you and try writing a haiku.”

 

Page 46:

“WRITE DOWN a quote THAT INSPRES YOU and place it somewhere you will see it often.”

 

Page 64:

“Look up the Feelings Wheel and explore the range of positive emotions in it.”

 

Page 80:

“Go to the Children’s Department in your local library and read a recommended children’s book.”

 

Page 101:

“The poet Toi Derricote wrote, JOY IS AN ACT OF RESISTANCE. Journal about how your joy is, OR COULD BE, AN ACT OF Resistance.” 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Feeling Wheel is from an October 1982 article by Gloria Wilcox on pages 274 to 276 in the Transactional Analysis Journal. My colored version for its inner circle, and just a Joyful Wheel are shown above.

 

A cartoon of a librarian was adapted from one at OpenClipArt.

 

 

Get speechwriting help by talking to a rubber duck

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The November 2025 issue of Toastmaster magazine has an article by Ben Guttmann on page 6 about speechwriting titled Talk It Out and subtitled How explaining a problem to a rubber duck leads to solutions. He has a quotation from a paragraph on page 95 of the 1999 book The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas:

“A very simple but particularly useful technique for finding the cause of a problem is simply to explain it to someone else. The other person should look over your shoulder at the screen, and nod his or her head constantly (like a rubber duck bobbing up and down in a bathtub). They do not need to say a word; the simple act of explaining, step by step, what the code is supposed to do often causes the problem to leap off the screen and announce itself.”

 The following paragraph (not included in Ben’s magazine article) adds further:

 “It sounds simple, but in explaining the problem to another person you must explicitly state things that you may take for granted when going through the code yourself. By having to verbalize some of these assumptions, you may suddenly gain new insight into the problem.”

 There also is a Wikipedia article titled Rubber duck debugging. And there is an article by Scott Hanselman on December 10, 2020 titled The Art of Rubber Ducking or Rubber Duck Debugging which describes how:

 “You'll find that getting the problem outside your head, via your mouth, and then back into your ears is often enough to shake brain cells loose and help you solve the issue.

 Rubber Ducking also is great practice in technical communication! Have you ever given a technical talk? There's actually not much distance between explaining a technical issue clearly, correctly, and concisely and giving a talk at a user group or conference!”

 Another article by Max Florschutz at UNUSUAL THINGS on June 14, 2021 is titled Being a Better Writer: The Rubber Duck. Still another article by Charlie Rapple at The SCHOLARLY kitchen for April 24, 2025 is titled Rubber Ducking for Research Communication: Why Explaining to Nobody Helps You Explain to Anybody.

 

 

The Year I Stopped to Notice is a delightful little book by Miranda Keeling

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By interlibrary loan from the Twin Falls Public Library I obtained and read a delightful little 2022 book by Miranda Keeling titled The Year I Stopped to Notice. It could have been subtitled The Joy of Noticing Little Things - which are what can make a speech memorable.  That book has 177 pages and is just 4-7/8’ wide by 6-1/2” high. There is a Google Books preview through page 32. Her introduction begins:

 

“You might be reading this because the cover looked cheerful, or you’re frantically searching for a present for a friend. You might just be marking time in a shop because it’s raining outside and you don’t want to leave yet. Whichever way you found yourself here, hello.

 

It’s the small moments, like the one you’re having right now, that make up this book: a woman in a shop opens a book and reads the introduction. Perhaps she is wearing a yellow dress. Her brown hair is curly. It is swept up with a silver clip in the shape of a shark. It is chilly in the shop, and she places the book down to take a knitted green cardigan out of her bag and put it on. The wool is thin at her right elbow. Perhaps a man reads this page. He sits at his laptop in a café, looking at the book online. He has dark red hair. His hands on the keyboard are freckled. He is avoiding work. Underneath the café table a small elderly dog sleeps across the man’s foot – the dog makes short whining noises at something in its dream, Perhaps one of these people is you. Perhaps you are completely different.

 

Days can feel long, and years fast. Our lives are full, yet at the end of the day when someone asks us what we did, we can barely remember. This book is the result of me stopping to notice the details and finding that ordinary life is extraordinary in its own way. If you’re someone who can find the big picture a little overwhelming and need moments of peace in the storm, or who loves the busy, layered fabric of life and just wants some of it captured to enjoy over coffee, read on.

 

Everywhere I go, I record what I notice: snippets of conversation, images, an atmosphere. I have been captivated by the everyday since I was very small. I grew up in Yorkshire, the Netherlands, America, and London. As my mum and I walked around these places, she would often interrupt a sentence to say: ‘Did you see that?’ I loved the times it turned out that we had spotted the same, small thing. At art college I studied glassmaking. I made miniature sculptures – if you looked closely at them, you could see worlds of colour inside. I carried a notebook everywhere, Then, about seven years ago, I began writing them down instead. Not everything I see is lovely. I live in the world. But that is not what this book is for. You will find the melancholy and the surreal here, but that’s as far as it goes.”

 

 Here are a half-dozen examples from the book:

 

Page 9 from January:

"Little boy on the train: Mama?

His mum: Yes?

Little boy: I never see you brush your hair.

His mum: I do a lot of things you don’t see.

(Pause)

Little boy: Like flying?"

 

Page 44 from March:

“A man on the train sighs as, having meticulously arranged his lunch on his little fold-down table, the woman from the window seat beside him needs the loo.”

 

Page 65 from May:

“A man has stopped on Oxford Street and stands in his socks, as he pours what appears to be green and pink confetti out of his shoes.”

 

Page 117 from August:

“A man outside a yet-to-open piano shop signals frantically to the woman inside to let him in. This is clearly a musical emergency.”

 

Page 137 from October:

“A little girl on a doorstep manages to negotiate eating an entire piece of toast while having her coat put on by her mum.”

 

Page 164 from December:

“Like an opening fan, five people at a bus stop lean sequentially to the left as they try to read the number of the bus coming up the road.

 

There is a 24-minute YouTube video at Carers UK on August 26, 2022 titled Stopping to notice with Miranda Keeling. And there is another newer book (I have not read) from June 2025 by Miranda Keeling titled The Place I’m In: What I see when I stop to notice, which again has a preview at Google Books. Miranda also has a podcast titled Stopping to Notice.

 

Back on February 28, 2014 I blogged about Speech topics from near your neighborhood, and paying attention to things - like a gold Buddha statue sitting on a white concrete bench next to the driveway of a home.

 

The train sign came from here at Wikimedia Commons.