From throngs of angry communists
who longed for Bar-B-Ques
we’ve been gifted something dear
though I’m not sure of its useA “holiday” devoid of fun
Lacking gifts or songs to sing
ironic that on Labor Day
we sit home and do nothing.
Five Books for Friday #3
Here we go again with five of the books I’ve been digging into over the last week. The subjects this time around are an interesting mix of projects, publishing, drawing, writing and poetry. Some weeks I find a ton of books all on the same subject I’m currently interested in. Other times it’s a random mix. Either way, I typically learn something useful and get entertained at the same time.
- First up is Souped Up, an Instructables.com book edited by Michael Huynh. It’s a mix of projects ranging from food to electronics and woodworking to Décor and furniture. My wife was especially thrilled with Gummy Bear Surgery which details how to create your own frankengummi monsters. This is one of those really simple time wasters that make you wonder how it could take four pages of instructions. But the ideas you get out of those four pages are pretty funny. I get more excited about reuse projects like making clocks out of old computer hard drives. I was only really interested in about a third of the projects in this book. But this kind of book is great for cherry picking.
- I love cartooning although I don’t get around to it nearly enough. Like most cartoonists, I dream about putting together a complete comic book someday. The Complete Guide to Self-Publishing Comics by Comfort Love and Adam Withers brings that dream one step closer. It’s not a book about drawing but more a book about the technical and business side of getting your art work into book form (printed or digital) and into the hands of your readers. The book has a lot of great tips on ideation, character development and dialogue. It also steps you through using Adobe Illustrator for layout, coloring and lots of other stuff. Finally, it talks about how to market your work after publishing to get it recognized among all the other self-published comics out there. I enjoyed the “Pro Tip” sidebars sprinkled throughout the book. This type of info is fun to read and gives you a sneak peek at real life implementations of what you’re learning.
- I posted a few weeks ago about doing zendoodles. I was inspired by a book my son brought back from the library and I’ve kept it since then to refer back to. Tangles: Amazing Zendoodles to Color and Draw by Abby Huff has some great patterns to get you started drawing your own doodles. You really don’t need a book like this to draw zendoodles or zentangles. The whole point is to create original designs that flow like a stream of consciousness writing. But it’s still nice to see what kinds of patterns you like and the different pen strokes that can get you there.
- I’m always looking for inventive ways to be more productive with my time and produce more of whatever I’m trying to do. That’s why I was intrigued by the title of How to Write a Lot by Paul J. Silva. The book’s premise boils down to disciplining yourself to sit down and write regularly. Now, I could have been frustrated that there wasn’t some magic bullet between the covers of this book but it’s refreshing to have somebody just reiterate the plain truth that you already knew. The fact is, if you want to write a lot, you have to write a lot. The book does give you more insight on the subject of course. You learn what barriers to writing a lot you might encounter. And you are introduced to motivational tools, styles and how to write certain types of works. Although this book was written primarily for academic writers, it still holds a lot of great insight no matter what your genre.
- I saved my favorite book for last. Alone and Not Alone is a compilation of poems by Ron Padgett. Padgett is a wonderfully accessible poet who uses humor and insight to bring everyday life onto the page. I like writing poetry in all different forms and on all different topics. But I’m very selective in the poets I actually enjoy reading. Padgett is one of those poets I actually enjoy reading. As with most poets there are a few of his selections that are just a bit too obtuse for me. But overall, his imagery, style and cadence just lead me from page to page and poem to poem. Sometimes I’ll read them out loud because I enjoy listening to the words. Highly recommended.
The Meaning of Lines
The consequence of
a painting I
observed in a book
is this poem.
With simple strokes it
came to life and
in my mind
set its hook
Light and dark play
havoc with my
sense of depth and
understanding
Can meaning lie in
unplanned lines?
If none is found then
art is maddening
Passage
The Paradox
Life’s greatest paradox is that you need a web browser to download a web browser.
Ryan Davison
The Human System
Human vision is amazing. Standing in my kitchen early one morning my eyes picked up the tiny, jerking movement of a very, very small moth. But my first thought was not “this is a moth”. Rather, it was “this is not a mosquito”.
Right now we’re in the middle of mosquito season and I’m always alert for ones that have invaded my home. I knew this bug wasn’t a mosquito right away although I didn’t have my glasses on and couldn’t clearly see it. It was the movement that gave it away. A mosquito seems to glide smoothly through the air while a moth makes erratic seeming movements in all directions.
My vision system registered all of that in a split second. Had it been a mosquito I probably would have reacted instantly by swatting at it since I’ve programmed my brain to think of them as needing to be killed before I get bit. Since it was a moth, I didn’t have to spring into action.
It’s amazing how the human brain reacts to its built-in sensors and makes a split-second decision whether to put the body into motion or not. Most of the algorithm my brain used to make this decision was formed over years of seeing bugs in flight, categorizing them and determining if they were dangerous or not.
Learning any task or skill is built up the same way. Repetitive input through the eyes and ears along with the movement from the rest of the body program the brain to recognize patterns and respond to them. At the same time, the brain uses these recorded programs to send feedback to the body that allows it to output the pattern. A skill is born.
What I’m interested in now is finding ways to imprint those patterns on the brain faster and more permanently. Of course one has to practice skills. But is there a way to acquire them more efficiently?
Five Book Friday #2
Once again I’m bringing you the fivebooks I’ve read or have been reading over the last week.
- The first one takes the reader on an 1800 mile walking trek throughout Central America. Walking the Americas by Levison Wood is an enjoyable first person account of the still wild lands that make up Central America. From Mexico to Panama and finally ending up in Columbia, Wood and his friend find adventure and danger from both nature and their fellow man. This one wasn’t the most compelling page turner I’ve ever read but it had plenty to keep me interested.
- I like some of Woody Allen’s writing and maybe two of his movies. So when I saw Mere Anarchy on the shelf last week, I grabbed it to see if Allen was as funny as in Without Feathers. Once again there was a mix of laugh out loud funny material and pseudo high brow snarkiness. In all it was a quick fun read.
- Patrick O’Donnell brings a barrel full of first and second hand WWII spy stories in his book Operatives Spies and Saboteurs: The Unknown Story of WWII’s OSS. This book is basically a collection of anecdotes collected and combined in a generally chronological order. I enjoy learning about unknown or largely unsung characters from WWII. This book gave me just that. The OSS was a facinating group of facinating men and women who made a huge impact on the outcome of the war. If you’re interested in wartime espionage, this is the book for you.
- David Naimon‘s interviews with Ursula K. Le Guin were published in Conversations on Writing. This question and answer book covers writing fiction, poetry and non fiction from LeGuin’s perspective. It’s not at all a how to on writing but rather herr philisophical ideas of different types of writing. It was an interesting read but slow in many parts. I’ll admit, I skipped a few parts that didn’t interest me.
- I spend a lot of time thinking about how to exercise better and more efficiently as I grow older. That’s why I was ineterested when I found Play On: The New Science of Elite Performance by Jeff Bercovici on the new release shelf. Jeff travelled around to document breakthroughs in sports performance hacks and trends, talk to olympians about their training regimens and dig into health fads that promise too much. I’m only about a quarter of the way through this one but will definitely finish it. I was especially interested in the chapter on a better way to think about conditioning. Many professional athletes like NFL players are plagued by injuries as early as the preseason. It could be that they simply don’t train smart and that they push themselves too hard too fast. Sometimes you have to slow down and actually work less to reduce your chances of injury and let your body stay fresh.
Always be learning
We must be learning if we are to feel fully alive, and when life, or love, becomes too predictable and it seems like there is little left to learn, we become restless – a protest, perhaps, of the plastic brain when it can no longer perform its essential task.
Dr. Norman Doidge – The Brain That Changes Itself
Beautiful Transformers
If you live in a neighborhood without overhead power lines, you likely live in a neighborhood with big, ugly, green transformers popping up out of cement pads. It’s not uncommon to have one every three or four houses.
Now, I understand the necessity for electrical transformers. I love electricity but even I know that 13000 volts is more than my toaster needs. But why do these utilities have to be so, utilitarian? Why do they all have to be the same olive drab green?
A nice alternative color scheme to mimic the neighborhood feel would go a long way toward removing these things as eyesores. I don’t blame the electric companies for not doing this. Sticking with one color is cheaper and easier to maintain. But I’d love to see them allowing customers to spruce them up.
So here’s an idea. Why not manufacture removable skins that can be stretched right over the top of one. Imagine the decorative possibilities. And it could be a great business. There are probably hundreds of thousands of these things in the U.S. alone and more are being put in all the time.
Overhead lines are coming down and being replaced with underground lines in many cities. In some ways, we are replacing ugly poles that everyone’s used to with ugly boxes right in people’s yards. It’s a ripe situation for a cosmetic solution.
Of course this will never happen. Anywhere there’s a warning sticker (like on every transformer ever installed), there’s absolutely zero chance of having any fun. That’s just the world we live in today. But I might start coming up with some designs anyway.
Five Books for Friday
Every week I hit the library, yard sales, bookstores, kindle and my own collection in search of something interesting to read. I thought I could start sharing what I’m reading each week and let you know what I liked and didn’t like. So here’s the first installment.
Gooley is one of the world’s foremost experts on natural navigation. For those of you not familiar with the term, natural navigation is land navigation using ones knowledge of nature and nature’s patterns. This book will tell you things like what plants and can tell you about the direction you’re facing or how the presence of certain birds can indicate the time of day.
You’ll learn a lot about observation and how to use your surroundings to live a more engaged and fulfilling life.
2. Look Big: and other tips for surviving animal encounters of all kinds by Rachel Levin
Look Big is a fun, quick read. It’s not just about surviving life and death encounters with animals. Levin is also full of advice on what to do when you come across raccoons and turkeys. I’ve come across wild turkeys, skunks and deer right in my front and back yard. It would have been nice to have read this book before then. But better late than never as they say.
3. Sitting Kills, Moving Heals by Joan Vernikos
I’ve written on this blog about the benefits of standing desks and the dangers of sitting too much. There’s really not a whole lot that needs to be added and I can’t believe there are so many books on the subject. Most of them can be boiled down “get up and move around more”. I mean, write a tweet or something but an entire book?
I’m also reading Get Up! : why your chair is killing you and what you can do about it by James A. Levine. I think the message is obvious from the title. Your chair is killing you! For goodness sake, get out of it; that’s what you can do about it! I might make a special trip to the library to return these two books early.
4. Mind Gym: achieve more by thinking differently by Sebastian Bailey
Your mind is like a muscle and you have to keep exercising it, blah, blah blah. I think the author needs to achieve a better book by thinking differently than all the other books saying the same thing. To be fair, I stopped reading this one early on so it might have been spectacular toward the end. However, you can buy it on Kindle for only $1.99 so it’s probably not spectacular toward the end.
5. Wits Guts Grit: all-natural biohacks for raising smart, resilient kids by Jena Pincott
I decided to give Jenna’s book a chance because it had the work hack in it. The premise is that the gut biome and the foods we put in it can affect our mood, memory and fortitude.
Most people understand that when you swallow medicine or a vitamin, it absorbs into your blood stream and affects your body and mind in extremely powerful ways. But then they shove their face full of sugar, colorings and artificial this-and-that without a clue these things act on us in the exact same way. This book looks at the foods we eat with a true understanding about how powerful they are.
This one was interesting, the writing was good and I liked the subject. But I never made it through the whole thing. Maybe someday I’ll come back to it. It’s $11.99 on Kindle but free as an audio book so the jury’s still out on this books true worth.
There you go. Five books I’ve been reading (or just paging through and then putting down with good intentions) recently. What books are you into? Let me know in the comments.