Another three stories from Kevin Ashton’s compelling new book The Story of Stories: The million-year history of a uniquely human art.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My previous post was titled The Story of Stories: The Million-Year History of a Uniquely Human Art is a compelling new book by Kevin Ashton. There are eight chapters in that book, titled as follows:

 

Chapter 1  A Million Years of Stories  1

Chapter 2  The Eye of Your Mind  34

Chapter 3  Pictures of Sounds  59

Chapter 4  The War of Stories  92   

Chapter 5  The All-Seeing Eye of Providence  136

Chapter 6  One One Zero  169

Chapter 7  Death by a Thousand Stories  210

Chapter 8  The Hyperreal Thing  250

 

Here are another three quotations out of this book. The tenth section in the fourth chapter, The War of Stories, is titled Story Factories. It begins on the bottom of page 130:

 

“Wood based paper first appeared in Germany in the 1840s, and by the end of the 1870s most printers in North America and Western Europe were using it. Not long after that, all paper was made from wood and none was made from rags. In less than thirty years, the price of paper fell by over 90 percent. In 1860 a pound of rags cost 44 US cents before pulping. In 1889, a pound of wood cost 4 cents after pulping. The invention of the mass production of mass communication, started by Gutenberg 450 years earlier was complete. An industrial revolution had transformed storytelling, and now there were story factories all over the world.

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

Those factories produced ever more stories, told by ever more storytellers, reproduced ever more times. In 1449, the year before Gutenberg’s printing press became operational, Europeans published two thousand new books and made an average of twenty-five copies of each one. In 1900, after paper made from wood replaced paper made from rags, Europeans published twenty thousand new books and, on average, there were twenty-five hundred copies of each one: ten times more stories a year, told by ten times more storytellers, to a hundred times more people.”  

 

The second section in the fifth chapter, The All-Seeing Eye of Providence, is titled Experience. It begins on page 139:

 

“We are now halfway through The Story of Stories. The first half covered a million years of storytelling, from the first nightfires to the first telecommunications; the second half covers only two hundred years.

 

This imbalance – four chapters for one million years, four chapters for 200 years – arises because the book’s structure is not time but change, and change is not linear: Its rate increases so much that the next two hundred years of the story of stories contains as much change as the first million years.

 

When we look at almost any example of long-term human progress, we see change speeding up around the fifteenth century. This acceleration was once mistaken for a sudden springlike return to creation after a centuries-long winterlike freeze: a ‘renaissance’ preceded by ‘dark ages.’ The various versions of this mistake are all story-shaped: They center heroic protagonists and, by implication, individual human agency, hidden behind hand-wavy vaguenesses like culture or faith.

 

This ever-increasing, ever-continuing rate of change is not caused by individual human agency. The change causes itself, especially the change in storytelling. Our increasing acceleration of innovation arises from our accumulation of equality, liberty, and freedom of thought; of health, life expectancy, and population; and of time for nonsubsistence activities, all of which exist because we have ever more ways to share experience using stories.

 

Experience is knowledge that we have stored and recorded. Before we could recall and retell stories, we stored our experiences in the error-prone, personal, private, and, above all, mortal medium of memory. The rise of storytelling, through speaking, singing, painting, writing, and printing, enshrined ever more experience in ways ever more immortal. Printing is especially good at transforming one person’s experience into everyone’s experience: Frederick Douglass died in 1895, for example, but we can forever share some of his lived experience as a slave by reading his books.

 

The invention of the printing press enabled and inspired ever more inventions for storing and sharing experiences, among them the first atlas in 1482, the first postal service in 1516, the first book of mathematical references and tables in 1533, the first peer-reviewed scientific journal in 1655, the first school textbook in 1690, and the first bookstore in 1732.

 

These inventions laid the foundation for an explosion of new storytelling technologies, many of them powered by electricity, in the nineteenth century, including the first electric telegraph in 1816, the first free, taxpayer-funded public library in 1833, the first photograph in 1838, the first paperback in 1841, the first practical typewriter in 1867, the first carbon copy in 1870 (now the vestigial ‘cc’ – carbon copy – and ‘bcc’ -blind carbon copy – options in the ‘send’ field of every email), the first telephone in 1876, the first duplicating machine for low-volume home, school, and office use in 1886, the first record player in 1887, and the first movie screening and the first radio transmission in 1895.

 

The speed with which we invented, improved, and industrialized these electricity-powered storytelling tools was a consequence of the accelerative, self-reinforcing effect of shared experience. New story-telling technologies create new storytelling technologies. Where writing took five thousand years to mature and spread around the world, and printing took two thousand years, the electrified storytelling tools of the 1800s developed and dispersed in little more than a century.

 

These inventions turned the nineteenth century into what we would now call an age of big data, where someone sitting at their kitchen table could benefit from the thoughts and experiences of others, of almost any kind, from almost any place and time, and preserve their own thoughts and experiences in handwriting, or as a printing-like typewritten manuscript that could be duplicated cheaply and in any quantity, from one to millions.

 

The inventions of the nineteenth century also laid the foundation for a twentieth-century storytelling technology: the television, invented by Philo Farnsworth in 1927, 111 years after the invention of the electric telegraph.”

 

The eighth section in the fifth chapter, The All-Seeing Eye of Providence, is titled A New Literacy. On page 160:

 

“Reading only writing may have been sufficient when writing was the only technology of story, but it is not enough today. Everyone must be able to ‘read’ stories no matter what technology is being used to tell them.

 

This technology-independent literacy is sometimes called transliteracy, a term that originated in 2005 with Alan Liu, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and means ‘the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks,’

 

Transliteracy is especially well understood by librarians, the underground freedom fighters in the war of stories, whose sworn duty is to connect people in the universe of the mass of humanity to knowledge. For example, here is Tom Ipri, a senior librarian at Temple University in Philadelphia, describing transliteracy’s importance:

 

Not only does transliteracy question previous assumptions of authority, it also calls into question the often assumed privilege of printed text. Transliteracy is not unique in questioning this bias – media literacy efforts have certainly tried to raise the profile of nonprint materials. But transliteracy is unique in combining democratizing communication formats, expressing no preference of one over the other, with emphasizing the social construction of meaning via diverse media. Because of the ways in which transliteracy questions authority and devalues hierarchical structures for disseminating information, transliteracy overlaps concerns much at the heart of librarianship.” 

 

Very detailed notes at the back of Kevin’s book point out that the above statement by Tom Ipri was edited for length from one in 2010 – it is a paraphrase rather than an exact quotation. You can find the original article by Tom Ipri at College and Research Library News (2010, Volume 71, Number 10) titled Introducing transliteracy: What does it mean to academic libraries? Also see the Wikipedia page for Transliteracy.

 

The 1904 drawing of a mysterious stranger (at the top left) telling a story came from the Library of Congress.

 

 

The Story of Stories: The Million-Year History of a Uniquely Human Art is a compelling new book by Kevin Ashton

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I found a compelling 2026 book by Kevin Ashton titled The Story of Stories: The million-year history of a uniquely human art at my friendly local public library and have been reading through the very many stories told in it. Google Books has a preview of just the first 16 pages. There are eight chapters, titled as follows, containing lots of stories:

 

Chapter 1  A Million Years of Stories  1

Chapter 2  The Eye of Your Mind  34

Chapter 3  Pictures of Sounds  59

Chapter 4  The War of Stories  92   

Chapter 5  The All-Seeing Eye of Providence  136

Chapter 6  One One Zero  169

Chapter 7  Death by a Thousand Stories  210

Chapter 8  The Hyperreal Thing  250

 

Here are four quotations from this book. The third section in the first chapter, A Million Years of Stories, is titled The Universal Story. It begins on page 6:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Our storytelling brains, unchanged since they first evolved, seek and tell stories that follow a simple pattern. This pattern is universal to all cultures, genres, periods, storytellers, storytelling technologies, and styles, and comprises three equally essential parts like the legs of a stool.

 

First, all stories feature humanlike characters as the agents of action. This is still true when the characters are supposed to be nonhuman. Stories that star aliens, Anglepoise lamps, animals, ants, trains, trees, and toasters are really about humans, which is why in stories these creatures tend to walk on two feet, talk, have expressive faces and eyes, feel human emotions, and set human goals. They are all rabbits in waistcoats – people pretending not to be people. Even Dr. Suess, creator of fabulous, apparently nonhuman characters including the Cat in the Hat, the Grinch, and Horton the Elephant, said, ‘None of my animals are animals; they’re all people.’ These humanlike characters are the story’s actors; they take the actions that cause the story to happen. They live at or near the story’s center. They are literally the people the story is about: it embraces, revolves around, and surrounds them.

 

Second, all stories relate a chronology, a sequence of events. The chronology does not have to be told in chronological order – it can have flashbacks, flash-forwards, and meanwhiles – but it has to relate connected events that happened at different moments. We would not call a description of a dozen things that all occurred in the same second a story. A story is always a journey through time.

 

Third, all stories must reach, or at least be headed for, a resolution. The sequence of events must have a consequence, and that consequence must arise from the actions of its human or humanlike agents. We are compelled to give sequences of events consequences, to seek justice for our characters, and to resolve unresolved stories. An unfinished story is like an unscratched itch; if a story we care about is not explicitly resolves, or if we have to wait to see how it ends because of a ‘to be continued’ cliffhanger climax we will often try to finish the story ourselves by imagining possible resolutions.”   

 

The fifth section in the third chapter, Pictures of Sounds, is titled The Ox and the House. It begins on page 69:

 

“We do not have to wonder whether Europeans could have found a way to get from pictures of things to pictures of syllables: They tried. In 1400 BCE the Greeks adapted picture-based writing from another language, Minoan, and used it almost entirely for accounting. Few Greeks could read it, and even fewer could write it. Then around 1100 BCE, for reasons that are still not well understood, Greek civilization collapsed, and the Greeks did not write again for hundreds of years.

 

But while Greece slumbered in its dark ages, The Canaanites, a seafaring people living in independent city-states in what is now Lebanon, and parts of Israel, Palestine, and Syria, solved the problem of how to write languages with clusters of consonants.

 

We can guess how it happened. Canaanites traded with, worked for, and were sometimes enslaved by Egyptians. Some Canaanites learned to read and write Hieratic, a simplified form of Egyptian hieroglyphics developed for writing on papyrus, a writing surface made from a plant that grows in the shallows of the Nile, with reeds dipped in ink. Hieratic was a flowing script that could be written quickly by joining some characters together – a style now known as cursive, after the Latin currere, ‘to run.’ Sometime around 1800 BCE, or possibly a few centuries earlier, one or more of the Canaanites adapted Hieratic so that they could use it to write their own language too.

 

The adaptation was ingenious. The Canaanites selected hieroglyphs of things whose names start with the sounds of the Canaanite language and used the hieroglyphs to represent these sounds. For example, the Canaanites’ word for ox was aleph, so they used the hieroglyph for ox, which looked like an ox’s head, to represent an ‘a’ sound. Their word for house was beth, so they used the hieroglyph for house, which looked like the plan of a house, for the sound ‘b,’ and so on. If you were Canaanite, and could identify what thing a character represented, you would also know what sound that character represented, and could read.

 

Using characters to represent sounds instead of syllables made the writing system very efficient, especially for consonant-laden languages where most syllables are not also words. For example, every native English speaker knows around twenty to thirty-five thousand words, created from about three thousand syllables. A writing system for English that used one character for each syllable would therefore need about three thousand distinct characters. But those three thousand syllables are composed of only thirty-five to forty-four distinct sounds, depending on what definition of sound you use. And so, if you write sounds, not syllables, you can represent an entire language in very few characters. That is what the Canaanites did, and it gave them a complete writing system using just thirty-two characters. 

 

The first two of those characters, aleph and beth, the signs for ‘ox’ and ‘house,’ gave the Canaanites’ writing system its English name, alphabet.

 

Some pictures the Canaanites chose are still discernible today, thirty-five hundred years later, in the Latin alphabet used by 143 nations. For example, if you turn a capital A upside down, you can see the head of the ox, horns and all; a capital B is the plan of a two-room house, the letter c is a boomerang, gimel; l is from lamed, a shepherd’s crook, m comes from mem, water, and is the shape of two waves; and o is an eye, ‘ayin, now without the pupil of its original Egyptian hieroglyph. These vestigial pictures exemplify how our tools improve by evolution more than invention.”

 

The tenth section in the third chapter, Pictures of Sounds, is titled The Secret Life of Stories. It begins on the bottom of page 87:

 

“Writing separates story and storyteller, and leaves readers to determine a story’s meaning by themselves. One of the most important consequences of this separation – and one that applies to all other forms of mass communication too – is that every reader is likely to imagine and interpret the same story differently. What the writer writes is not what the reader reads.

 

And that raises a question: Is a story what is written or what is read?

 

This is not a new concern. Literary theorist Roland Barthes, among many others, wondered about it. Barthes concluded a story is not what is written but what is read; so much so that he proclaimed the ‘death of the author,’ saying: ‘The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. The reader holds together the written text. To give writing its future, the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.’

 

Barthes argued that there are two kinds of story: the readerly story, which requires little interpretation by the reader – the story is readerly because the reader mainly reads – and the writerly story, which requires lots of interpretation by the reader – the story is writerly because the reader does so much interpretation that they almost write the story themselves.

 

Or, some stories are so straightforward that they lead every reader to imagine a similar story, and others are so ambiguous that they lead every reader to imagine a different story. A stop sign is an example of something extremely straightforward and readerly: Everyone who reads it understands it the same way. A Rorschach test – a psychological test in which someone is shown an image comprising nothing but inkblots and asked ‘What might this be?’ – is an example of something extremely ambiguous and writerly: Everyone who ‘reads’ it understands it differently. Neither of these two things are stories, and no stories are as extreme as these two things, but every story lies somewhere between.”

 

The fifth section in the fourth chapter, The War of Stories, is titled Mass. It begins on page 112 and it says that:

 

“Printing came late to Europe, but when it arrived, the consequences were much the same as in China, Japan, and Korea.

 

On the day Gutenberg’s printing press started operating, scribes half a mile away were laboring in the scriptorium of St. Alban’s Abbey, copying scriptures and other Christian writing using goose-feather quills dipped in ink. The best and fastest of them, who were called antiquarii, wrote one or two pages that day. In Gutenberg’s workshop, the printing press produced three thousand pages. This wasn’t just a change in scale – it was a revolution in how ideas could spread.

 

Europe’s scribes produced eleven million documents in the thousand years before Gutenberg invented the printing press. Presses based on Gutenberg’s design produced thirteen million documents by 1500. What once took a century now took four years.

 

Gutenberg invented the mass production of mass communication. His achievement established a pattern that repeats with each successive storytelling technology: that the true transformation comes not from the invention itself but from making it fast enough, cheap enough, and reliable enough for mass adoption. Gutenberg’s press could produce thousands of pages per day, but the revolution he started was not only because of speed or volume; it was also because of what happens when one idea enters thousands of minds simultaneously. That change is far more significant, and far more difficult to quantify or even qualitize.”

 

The 1848 painting of Baku storytelling by August Wilhelm Kiesewetter came from Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

In 2025 Rosie Grant published a book titled To Die For: A cookbook of gravestone recipes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back on May 28, 2011 I blogged about How will you be remembered? I showed eight examples of gravestones at the Morris Hill cemetery. Some thoughtfully included a bench or seat.

 

Rosie Grant’s book To Die For: A cookbook of gravestone recipes shows another delicious way to be remembered – via almost 40 recipes on the back (or top) of gravestones. There is an article by Michele Hermann at Smithsonian magazine on October 10, 2025 titled A Recipe Engraved on a Gravestone Helps to Remember the Dearly Departed and Keep Part of Them Alive. It begins by showing a recipe for Spritz Cookies on top of a gravestone for Naomi Odessa Miller-Dawson in Brooklyn, New York. (Spritz cookies are extruded from dies on a cookie press).

 

There is another article by Sharyn Jackson in The Minnesota Star Tribune (and The Union Democrat) for January 10, 2025 titled Taking their beloved recipes to the grave which shows the Easy Potato rolls from page 104 of book and in my cartoon.

 

An earlier article by Todd Tanner at East Idaho News on May 29, 2021 is titled Family shares story behind fudge recipe on Utah headstone. It has Kay’s Fudge, which is shown beginning on page 84 of the book.

  

Another earlier article by Sam O’Brien at AtlasObscura on October 31, 2023 titled The Family Recipes That Live On in Cemeteries includes Bonnie June Rainey Johnson’s No-Bake Chocolate Oatmeal Cookies, shown beginning on page 13 of the book. And it also includes Ida Kleinman’s Nut Rolls recipe (from Rehovoth, Israel) shown beginning on page 96 of the book and originally written in Hebrew.

 

The gravestone cartoon was adapted from one at OpenClipArt.

 

 

Living in the Present with John Prine is a memoir by Tom Piazza

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On April 14, 2020 I blogged about Remembering John Prine – a great storyteller. There is an article by Tom Piazza in the Oxford American on October 8, 2018 about that singer-songwriter titled Living in the Present with John Prine. John selected Tom to write a memoir with the same title – a 2025 book Living in the Present with John Prine. Near the end, on pages 157 to 160 his lead guitarist Jason Wilber described John’s combination of abilities:

 

“John loved performing, for sure. He had a really …I want to say he had a natural talent for it, but that, I think, underplays what I’m trying to communicate. I’ve said this before, to other people, but I feel like I stood there with John onstage for twenty-four years, and watched him do a magic trick over and over … and over. It always worked, he pulled it off every time, and I still don’t know how he did it. He had this ability to communicate on an emotional level through his writing. ‘How in hell can a person go to work in the morning, come home in the evening and have nothing to say?’ I don’t think there was a time I heard him sing that line onstage that at least one person in the audience didn’t cry out, and go ‘Whooo!’ or respond in some way, and usually lots of people. Think about that. That’s not, like, a normal thing. You know what I mean? That line is not asking you to comment in some way. It’s not saying, like, ‘Hey, everybody put your hands in the air…’ It’s a spontaneous reaction to a line that communicates something of such emotional depth and resonance that people are prompted to spontaneously cry out. And I heard that happen over and over. Almost every night.

 

So that’s just the writing part. But he also had the ability to do that as a performer, as a live in-person communicator. He just had this emotional intelligence that was off the charts. He was a genius in his way. And I know that’s not news to you. Or anyone! But that is really what struck me about being onstage with him. It’s not just that he could do a good show, and in fact, if you reduce this to technical execution of music, he was not that ‘good.’ And I mean that with complete respect. But, like, if you just wanted to measure this with scientific instruments, John’s show wasn’t good because his vocal intonation was perfect, or his guitar technique was perfect, or his guitar was perfectly in tune, or because he was making no mistakes … Quite the contrary! But it didn’t matter. Because his ability to deliver the rest of it – the emotional part – was so in the stratosphere that none of that shit mattered.   

 

And for me, as someone who spent their whole life practicing, and trying to learn how to do things exactly the way I was trying to do … It took me a long time to understand that, like, wow, John is actually doing the things that I thought … I thought I was on the path to what he was doing, but now I see he’s doing it with none of those things. It didn’t matter if he made mistakes on the guitar, or he was out of tune. In fact, when he messed up people loved him more. He would make a mistake and people would cheer! Because of a look he would make, or the way he would react to it.

 

But here’s the other part – it wasn’t only onstage. He just had this ability to communicate with people. If you only knew John superficially, you could say, ‘He’s a regular guy. Just a nice guy.’ And he was. But he was also … his emotional intelligence extended into the interpersonal. The same way he could connect with a whole room full of people, he could sit across the table from you – not that he was always connected, because sometimes he would be off in Archie comics land – but when he was there with you he could be really tuned in to you and know a lot about where you were, even maybe more than you knew.

 

He had a pretty good read on almost everybody and every situation. I think that allowed him to trust people … He could read people quickly. He had an idea of who you were and what you were about. He wouldn’t say it, he didn’t talk about it, but he knew. He was super, super smart, in his own way. Not like he knew the atomic weight of water, or whatever, but he was smart in all these other ways that really mattered. I think his talent was in some ways a mystery to him as well. He knew that he had this talent, that he was off-the-charts good at this one thing, but he didn’t necessarily understand why he was. But he knew it. And he knew he could trust it. 

 

I used to think if you work hard at something you can get as good as anybody else. But those things I just talked about, about John – writing, performing, communicating, reading people – communicating with people based on his reading of what’s happening – I could work on them until the end of time and never be nearly as good as him.”

 

A good way to get to know John is to watch ten Youtube videos of his live performances from Sessions at West 54th:

 

Sam Stone

Hello In There

Spanish Pipedream

Lake Marie

Souvenirs

All the Best

Far From Me

Six O’Clock News

In Spite of Ourselves (duet with Iris Dement)

The Jet Set (duet with Iris Dement)

 

There is another article at Country and Midwestern titled John Prine Explains the Origin of “Lake Marie”. And still another article by Clayton Edwards at American Songwriter on October 28, 2024 titled “Midwestern Mindtrips”; Why Bob Dylan Names John Prine Among His Favorite Songwriters Ever said Bob liked Lake Marie best.

 

The 2016 image of John Prine is from Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

Dick Van Dyke told his hardest story from a 75-year career

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dick Van Dyke turned 100 on December 13, 2025. And he published a book with a series of stories titled 100 Rules for Living to 100: An optimist’s guide to a happy life. An article by Sarah Lemire at Today on November 18, 2025 is titled EXCLUSIVE: At Almost 100, Dick Van Dyke Won’t Sit Still – and Is Eyeing 1 More Big Role. She notes that he had a 75-year career. There is another article by Liz McNeil in People magazine on November 25, 2025 titled Dick Van Dyke ‘Feels Pretty Good for 100.’ Here’s Why He’s Optimistic About His Centennial Birthday (Exclusive).

 

 On pages 105 to 113 there is a great story, titled Tell Your Hardest Story:

 

“In December 1973, I found a seat in a circle of chairs in a grim, fluorescent-lit meeting room at the Brentwood Veterans’ Hospital. Around me were military vets, young and old, all hospitalized for drug and alcohol addiction and gathered for regular group therapy. I was there as a visitor, doing research for my role as an alcoholic in The Morning After, a TV movie being shot elsewhere in the facility.

 

It was weird for these guys to have a Hollywood actor eavesdropping on their raw, real-life stories of struggle, I could tell. Right off the bat, I needed to assure them that I would be a sympathetic listener. ‘The subject of my movie is very personal to me,’ I began, ‘because I myself am an alcoholic.’

 

Their faces flickered with surprise. At the time, only my family and a handful of other people in my life knew about my drinking problem.

 

‘So, I understand some of what you’re going through. But really, I’m here to listen and learn.”

 

Then Dick decided to go public.

 

“The story got picked up across the country. As expected, when Mr. Goody Two-shoes admitted his addiction to the world, the public was shocked. Friends and colleagues from wherever I’d lived and worked called to offer sympathy and encouragement, reporting that they, and everyone they knew could barely believe the news. Within a week, I was getting letters by the thousand – people were moved and incredibly understanding. Many detailing how alcoholism had impacted them and their loved ones.

 

That reaction spurred me to go even more public. I appeared on The Dick Cavett Show, one of the best interviews I’ve ever done, and I told my story onstage in Washington, DC, for a press conference with other celebrity alcoholics. I am told that rehab facilities still show The Morning After to this day.

 

…. Each time I put a new layer of it into words, I feel a release of the power that alcoholism had over me. I was separating myself from the disease, seeing my experience as a battle with the disease. Telling my story was giving me power and freedom.

 

Each of us has our own hard stories of crisis and struggle. When we hold them in, out of fear or shame, they control us. But when we tell our stories, we’re in the driver’s seat. And when we share those stories, even just among our friends and family, we are literally helping one another to survive, just like that brotherhood of vets.”  

 

Pages 9 and 10 have a story titled Make Your Own Rules. On page 10 Dick has the following weasel words about his rules and stories:

 

“I readily admit that you might find variations of the same rule emerging in multiple stories here. That’s because my life, like everyone else’s, has its personality-specific ongoing themes – questions that pop up, over and over again, in different contexts, old challenges that look different in each new light, wisdom learned and forgotten and learned again.

 

I might also add that, for some of these stories, there’s not exactly a rule or even a specific question. Sometimes that’s because I know there’s some nugget of meaning in the story, but I haven’t figured out what it is. Maybe you can! Other times, it’s just a funny story, plain and simple. Because don’t we all sometimes just need comic relief?

 

Finally, if you’re inclined to count up these rules to see if there are exactly one hundred, as advertised in the title, your math might disappoint you, just a little. Quality over quantity, as the saying goes, right? I can assure you that this book will deliver enough main rules, sub-rules, ancillary rules, and multipart rules to last you a lifetime, yes, all the way to one hundred!”    

 

His book doesn’t bother to number those stories or even give us a Table of Contents. I got suspicious about whether there really were a hundred, and then wrote down the following list of all the story titles (grouped ten at a time):  

 

Don’t Act Your Age

Make Your Own Rules

Examine Your Head

Learn to Fall

Find Your Passion in Your Past

Tolerate and Cherish Your Little Brother

Face Your Fear

Find “The New You” Inside “The Old You”

Find Your People – A Story in Several Parts

Figure Out Who You Aren’t

 

Don’t Litter: Tips for Safety and Hygiene on Family Road Trips in the 1950s

Don’t Count on “The Big Break”

Hone Your Bit (Every Job Is Training for the Next One)

Don’t Do Live Morning TV

Some Secrets You Shouldn’t Tell

Eggs Again? Some Failures Are Just That

Dance with Chita

Go Nuts (But Maybe Not That Nuts)

Suck Up to the Landlady

Speak Up for Your Family

 

It Doesn’t Take a Good Boss to Do Great Work

Accept Your Limitations

Win an Oscar

Stay on the Phone

Make Christmas with What You’ve Got

Don’t Trust Machines

Reconsider the Boogeyman

Tell Your Hardest Stories

Play Against Type

Retire on Your Own Terms

 

Remain Anonymous

Start a Band

Commit to Play

Save All That Artwork

Believe in Fate

Take Your Doubts to the Desert

Accept “Rescue” with Grace

See the Pattern to Get Past It

Help Someone Find Their Voice: Do’s and Don’ts

Reimagine Your Legacy

 

Read the Fine Print

Learn from Animals: 3 Species, 4 Rules

Get a Good DJ

Write It Down

Bond Through Crisis

Be Someone’s Baker

Get Frank: A Meditation on Old Rifts

Remember the Good Stuff, Leave the Rest Behind

Reminisce While You Can

Get a Great Sidekick

 

Clear the Air

Get a Second Opinion (and a Third and a Fourth…)

Learn from Teaching

Cross Off Regrets

Learn from Shame

Never Call “Cut”

Don’t Match Jimmy

Don’t Live in the Past

It Pays to Go to the Gym

Build a Slide and Grandkids Will Come

 

Transmogrify Halloween (On Family Traditions)

The Clothes Make the Gnome

Stay Tall Inside

Hand Over the Keys

Read While You Can

Do Get All Judgy (When You’re Watching TV)

Learn a New Way to Fall

Carpe Chita

Remember Honestly

Live with Regrets

 

Your Purpose Doesn’t Need to be Grand

You Will Not Be Alone

Save the Afterlife for After Life

You Can’t Protect Your Survivors

Find Your Arlene

 

As you can see, there are just seventy-five. The book could have more honestly been titled Seventy-Five Rules from My 75-Year Career: An optimist’s guide to a happy life.

 

The wreath was adapted from one at OpenClipArt.  

 

Our tools for measuring, recording, remembering, and reasoning about time

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is an excruciatingly detailed 22-page pdf article by Kensy Cooperrider at Topics in Cognitive Science on April 29, 2025 (Volume 18, Number 1, pages 147 to 168) titled Time Tools. He concludes:

 

“We humans come into the world with basically the same biological equipment for managing time as many other animals, and probably all other primates. But we nonetheless end up with an understanding of time that is unlike any other in the natural world. This is because we alone have developed cognitive technologies to help us grapple with temporal structures - and helpful they are. They allow us to tally, coordinate, predict, measure, record, remember, and reason; they allow us to deal with time in new, powerful ways. Though some of the consequences of time tools are quite recent, others are far older: some scholars have proposed that early time tools like seasonal calendars may have already begun to improve our foraging success in the Upper Paleolithic.

 

Our cognitive technologies for thinking about time have now become so deeply internalized, so woven into our understanding of the world, that we can barely imagine a world without them. Clocks, calendars, and timelines; seconds, minutes, hours; shared ways of talking about time as something to be saved and ‘budgeted’; ideas of time zones and deadlines and setting clocks back - these ideas are now utterly banal. Today, to not know the day of the week - an arbitrary convention par excellence—is to experience deep disorientation. Physicians check on patients’ faculties by asking them what year it is, and a common formal screening for cognitive impairment involves reading an analog clock. One of the most remarkable aspects of our time tools - and of human cognitive technologies in general - is that we grow so dependent on them that they become almost invisible.

 

Here, I have tried to shake up this feeling of invisibility - to remove, as it were, the glasses we had forgotten we were wearing. By focusing on earlier, less familiar time tools - in particular, those that came before the rise of ubiquitous ‘clock time’ - I have tried to bring into focus: first, the diversity of concepts, practices, and artifacts humans have developed for dealing with time; and, second, the universality of the practical problems that humans have used time tools to solve. The importance of our time tools is hard to overstate. Much is made –understandably - of our species’ ecological dominance, of the fact that we were able to spread over a vast swath of space, occupying niches that are completely inhospitable to other primates. Less is made of our species ‘temporal dominance,’ of the fact that we alone have learned to navigate and master - and, arguably, construct - a fourth dimension of the world. Without time tools this would have been, quite literally, unthinkable.”

 

An image of Big Ben came from Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

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.

 

Some memories of the Air Force Reserve - for Veterans Day

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In spring 1972 I enlisted in the Air Force Reserve to be a medic - before the Army could draft me. That meant I would first be on active duty, and then have reserve duty for six years: one weekend every month and two weeks during the summer. So, I spent the second half of that year on active duty. First was basic training in San Antonio. Early one morning the son of a Chief Master Sergeant (the highest enlisted rank) told me his father’s favorite joke:

 

“What is the difference between the Air Force and the Boy Scouts? The Boy Scouts have adult leadership.”

 

Then I had tech school in Wichita Falls. Finally, I had on the job training in a hospital near St. Louis.

 

In 1973 I started graduate school at Carnegie Mellon University. I also was working for one weekend a month as a reserve medic in the clinic out at the Greater Pittsburgh Airport that was part of the 911th Tactical Airlift Group. Most of my job was helping do the annual flight physicals. That meant I did tasks like eye tests, hearing tests, blood pressures, pulse rates, electrocardiograms, and even footprints.

 

From 1973 until 1975 on paper I belonged to a unit called the 911th Mobility Support Squadron. It is jargon meaning replacement troops, and had the acronym MSS. No vowel you add to make it pronounceable looks good. I vote for mess. You may remember the 1988 movie Bull Durham about a minor league baseball team. Kevin Costner plays the veteran catcher Crash Davis who just has been sent to the Durham Bulls to balance out a trade. When he walks into the team manager’s office the manager scowls and asks, Who are you? He introduces himself by replying that he is just the player to be named later. My reserve unit felt like that. We were only a minor league team. Morale always was near zero. If I did not have to be there, I would have preferred to be somewhere else.

 

In July 1975 I was told I had been reassigned. Now I belonged to the 758th Tactical Airlift Squadron. I walked up the hill to the base operations building to sign in with my new unit before going to work. When I went in, I noticed that everyone was smiling. They all were happy to be there. Their Admin sergeant welcomed me. His first five words were that: we are all professionals here.

 

Before I headed down the hill to work at the clinic, I needed to stop and use the bathroom. What I saw there amazed me. Inside the toilet stall door, under a clear plastic cover, was a sheet of paper listing exactly what each aircrewman (pilot, copilot, and flight mechanic) had to do to handle an in-flight nightmare – having one of the two piston engines on the plane fail. The title read Don’t just sit there; have an accident. As I washed my hands I looked around and saw that the same emergency procedures also were posted on the wall above every urinal. I thought, wow, these guys are really serious.

 

The 758th flew a twenty-year-old cargo plane called the C123K. If you saw the movie Con Air then you have seen one. It looks like the one shown above.  It has a high straight wing with two piston engines, and a fuselage shaped like a pig. It carries 15 tons of cargo or up to sixty troops The C123K was not pressurized, and wasn’t really even watertight. It has a wimpy official name - the Provider.

 

But the C123K had a secret. Under the wings there also were a pair of auxiliary jet engines. Their added thrust could get the plane into the air from a very short dirt runway. It also could keep the plane flying normally with one piston engine completely shut off. The Air Force had a series of jet fighters whose names started with the powerful word Thunder: the F-84 Thunderjet and Thunderstreak, and the F-105 Thunderchief. So the 758th renamed their plane the mighty Thunderpig.

 

The 758th had adult leadership. They believed in personal empowerment. Treat all your people like adults and give them room to blossom. Tell them what needs to be done, and let them work as a team to get it done. Other than emergency procedures you don’t need to spell out exactly how.

 

Now, that was not the typical attitude in Pittsburgh back then. Mostly you got arrogant management butting heads with powerful unions like the United Steelworkers, the USW.  Loadmasters in the 758th were a burly, boisterous, bunch of Polish-American sergeants who worked as hammersmiths over at a USW forge shop. Most were almost in the same shape as back when they had played high school football. They were proud of their reserve unit and treated it like it was their football team.     

 

Eighteen months later I watched the 758th accept an award – the Grover Loening Trophy for best flying unit in the Air Force Reserve. Here is one reason why. One of their planes was flying low at night with a full load of Army Rangers getting ready for a paratroop drop. The ramp and door on the back of the plane already were wide open when one engine sputtered and then quit. They began to lose altitude rapidly. The crew feathered the propeller, started up the auxiliary jets and the mighty Thunderpig climbed and got them home safely. A less skilled crew probably would have crashed and killed all 45 people aboard.  

 

Personal empowerment comes in all sorts of places. I found it in an Air Force Reserve unit. Which unit does your workplace resemble more, the Mobility Support Squadron (a mess) or that Tactical Airlift Squadron? Could you help change it?

 

An image of a C123K came from Wikimedia Commons.

 

Remembering Fred Rogers and the Children’s Corner

Most of Monday’s Fresh Air program at National Public Radio was about how It’s a beautiful 50th birthday for ‘Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.’ That got me thinking about my joyful memories of Fred Rogers, from early childhood in Pittsburgh.

The Neighborhood actually was his third TV show. It was proceeded by Misterogers, a 15-minute program on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation from 1963 to 1966. His first show was only in Pittsburgh on WQED beginning in 1954. It was called The Children’s Corner, and ran for an hour on weekdays. There is a summary for one episode. Fred produced, wrote and played the music, but the visible hostess on live TV was Josie Carey (who wrote lyrics). 

Fred also operated his puppets, who engaged in impromptu conversations with Josie when the educational films they were showing broke. For example, there is a minute of YouTube video about building a house.

Daniel Striped Tiger, King Friday XIII, Xscape the Owl, etc. all first appeared on the Children’s Corner. King Friday had a royally pompous version of Row, Row, Row Your Boat:

“Propel, propel, propel your craft

gently down liquid solution

Ecstatically, ecstatically, ecstatically, ecstatically,

Existence is but an illusion”

There was a 1954 book about the series called Our Small World. I vaguely remember that the Daniel Striped Tiger’s chapter contained several recipes, which all began something like: 

“Take four pounds of medium-grind hamburger.” 

Not much video of the show is easily accessible, but there are some audio recordings on YouTube, like from the 1958 LP Around the Children’s Corner.