P.S. A Column On Things

Start of January 17 Column

Mindfulness

For just over a year a now I have been on a mindfulness journey, including a 10-minute daily meditation. I think I now spend more time in the moment and that is important. They call it the present for a reason.

Looking back, I can see I had three hours a day of mindfulness practice for 11 years, but it wasn’t formal: that was the decade I spent teaching 8^th grade U.S. History half-time.

Teaching is without question mindfulness practice; the consequences of even a moment’s inattention can be major and disastrous.  And now, I am once again spending three mornings a week with my grandson while his parents WFH. That, too, is a mindfulness practice. Any moment I am “not there” is a moment wasted, and a possible step towards small-scale disaster. We should all take our mindfulness where we find it, because it’s good for you/me in so many ways.

Paul’s Poetry Corner: Road Ahead

Link to: Road Ahead
Which begins:
I contemplate the road ahead,
But in the long run, we’re all dead,

As economists often said.

Right Column Redux: WTBS Days

The column to the right on this blog contains permanent content, most of which has appeared at one time or another in the main body. I’ve decided to include a reminder of said content each week.

From my WTBS days, 1970-1972

Sam Patch, The Greatest Story Ever Told So Far

The New Eugene Oregon Show

Humor: Is Hell Endothermic?

Snopes says this joke has been around in various forms since the 1920s, and was almost certainly not a student answer on a test. Nevertheless, it is funny.

Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat), or endothermic (absorbs heat) ?

This question purportedly appeared in a University engineering exam entitled, "Momentum, Heat and Mass Transfer". The following answer was considered so brilliant, a University Professor shared it with his colleagues, before it finally reached the Internet.

The question was designed to test the students' understanding of Boyle's Law; gas becomes cooler when it expands and heats up when compressed.

The following is a brilliant exposition of Boyle's Law by an engineering student.

First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they leave. This is unlikely because we can safely assume that once a soul arrives in Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls leave Hell. As for how many souls enter Hell, let’s look at the different religions that exist in the world today.

Most religions state that if you do not subscribe to their beliefs, you will go to Hell. Since there is more than one of these religions, and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can say that all souls go to Hell. With the current birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially.

Now, we will look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell, because Boyle’s Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to remain constant, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added.

This gives us two possibilities:

1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls arrive, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until .........well, Hell explodes!
2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the rate at which souls arrive, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.

So, which is it?

If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during my Freshman year that, “I won't sleep with you until Hell freezes over,” and take into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then number two must be true. Thus, I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has already frozen over.

However, a secondary effect of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it follows that no more souls are able to enter, leaving only Heaven as a possible destination. This suggests the existence of a divine Being which explains why, last night, Teresa kept shouting ‘Oh, my God!’

Jobs Redux 3: Summertime and the Living is Busy

1971

Another busy summer before my sophomore year at MIT. As I did the summer before, I worked weekdays at KGW-TV and weekends at KKEY radio. I also kept busy writing the pretentiously titled Great American Novel (a thinly fictionalized version of my freshman year), the Twilight Dome (a radio show for Michael Wildermuth that he didn’t have time to do, converted into the New Eugene Oregon Show) and I wrote a letter every day to Sherry Grobstein, with whom I fell in love that summer. Turns out being the transmitter operator at KKEY amounted to eight hours a day with a typewriter, an ample supply of paper, and about 10 minutes of actual work an hour.

1972

WHDH-TV lost its TV license, so WBZ-TV picked up the Red Sox, so they needed studio technicians to free up baseball camera operators. A lovely summer of 7 p.m. to 2 a.m. shifts out on Soldier’s Field Road.

1973

My first relevant summer job, as an intern at Portland’s afternoon daily newspaper, The Oregon Journal. I spent my spare time at the paper writing a letter every day to my new love, Beth Karpf.

1974

The summer after my senior year marked my last summer job, as production manager of The Tech. I was reluctant to take the job, but the production shop was the paper’s major source of revenue, and I loved the paper, so there I was. In August I started with the AP, and ever since my summer job has just been my fallwinterspring job, but in the summertime.

This and That and Peckarsky

My Near Death Experience
Fifteen years ago I experienced ventricular fibrillation and passed out doing 60 on southbound I-680 in Walnut Creek. I nearly died in the resulting single-car accident. Here are my contemporaneous thoughts on The Duality of Life Changing Moments.
…

Nice News
Just when the news seems to be a hellish dystopian landscape, something like this pops up: A UPS driver left a kind message for a family. They put it on Instagram, and strangers showered the driver’s baby with gifts. - The Washington Post.
…
More Nice News
Also from the Post: A pet dog ran off into the mountain wilderness. Four months later, rescuers found it trapped in 5 feet of snow.
…
Good Vs. Evil
“Spock, I've found evil usually triumphs unless good is very, very careful,” Dr. Leonard H. "Bones" McCoy, Star Trek (episode written by Gene Roddenberry)
...
Mini Review: Swan Song
This Nextflix movie takes a fascinating, well-written and well-acted  look at the ethics of human cloning. It is supposedly set in the near future, but it’s going to be a LONG time before technology faces us with these kinds of difficult decisions―should I allow creation of a clone to replace me as I am dying early?
Plus, I didn’t know and you may not know that the figure of speech “swan song” comes from the ancient Greek belief that swans only sing once, as they are dying.
…
Micro Review: The Anomaly ****
Hervé Le Tellier’s beguiling novel of science fiction, social commentary, political commentary and French snobbishness about America. With razor-sharp wit, he scores point after point while punching up against our crazy world’s crazy situation. I didn’t care for the ending, so four stars.
...
News of Peckarsky for Senate
Peter Peckarsky, running for the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination in Wisconsin wants to insure the privacy of absentee ballots and electronic voting machines, so he wrote to the Wisconsin election commission.

End of January 17 Column (No. 808)

Start of January 10 Column

Me and French Cuff Shirts

I had a Proustian moment this week. It was not the smell of a madeleine that set me off; it was a columnist’s casual remark, “I hate French cuff shirts.”

I bought my first French cuff shirt 53 years ago. It was black. I always wore it with a white tie, all the way through college. (To be honest, the depicted black shirt is my second one; the first was ruined by cigarette smoke when I tended bar at my aunt’s party, age 17). Black shirt/white tie was a Mafia look in the 1960s, but I was drawn to French cuffs when I noticed in photographs that executives, politicians and movie stars all wore them. All my dress shirts have had French cuffs ever since. I am down to six of them (the black one disappeared shortly after I was married).

I wore French cuff shirts to high school, even though there was no dress code. They contributed, I am sure, to my reputation for eccentricity. I know I still wore them on “state” occasions in college because of the photo I linked to above, and because of my distinct memory of my first visit to my fiancé Sherry’s house in Elizabeth, N.J.; I packed three French cuff shirts and found myself in a cuff link desert, so I wore them with paper clips. (To this day, I carry a spare pair―cuff links, not paper clips― in my suitcase)

I wore them daily as a journalist and as a middle-school teacher. You can see that I wore them while reviewing software for the Computer Chronicles.

These days, I don’t go out, I don’t have meetings on Zoom or in person, I no longer appear on PBS, but because I enjoy looking stylish, I still wear French cuff shirts around the house three days a week. To me, they continue to be the epitome of class.

I still have several of my high school cuff links, but they are so garish I rarely wear them. My four favorite cuff links among the handful I have left came to me from my wife and my daughters, and I essentially wear those all the time. Neither of my sons-in-law will want them, so my French cuffs are on a greased slide to the great Goodwill store.

Poetry: Contributing to Joy

Link to:  Contributing to Joy

Which begins: When I contribute to your joy
It is not a scheme or a ploy.
I’m doing what comes naturally,
Because of what’s inside of me

Right Column Redux: Paul's Tales of Teaching

The column to the right on this blog contains permanent content, most of which has appeared at one time or another in the main body. I’ve decided to include a reminder of said content each week.

Paul's Tales of Teaching

Humor: Washington Post Neologism Contest

Jobs Redux 2: Summertime and the Living is Busy

Summer 1968

I know I had a summer job in 1968, but I cannot for the life of me remember what it was. Since it’s been 53 years at this writing, I will not be hard on myself for the lapse.

By fall, I was volunteering for Wayne Morse, the Lion of the Senate, who was defeated by Robert Packwood, who went on to become the Doofus of the Senate, driven from office by an early outbreak of #metoo.

1969: Talk and Rock

During my junior year, I participated in a Benson program that allowed early dismissal for a job; I drove a van to deliver clothes for Sanford’s Children Wear. Boring, but less boring than hanging around doing classes that wouldn’t help me get into MIT. Then Ev Helm got me a job doing a talk show on KLIQ AM-FM as Paul St. John, and I got a job as a disc jockey at one of America’s first underground rock stations, KVAN.

1970 TV and Politics

As a result of earning my FCC First-Class Radiotelephone Operator’s Permit, I became a weekend engineer at KKEY radio, got a job as a summer relief camera operator and board op at KGW-TV. I still cared about politics, and so worked on progressive Art Pearl’s losing gubernatorial campaign. I remember being tired a lot.

1970-1974 MIT Termtime: Dormphone, The Tech

A lot of people I know who had to earn their way through school, did so in the library or the cafeteria. I was blessed with two clean, indoor, interesting jobs that allowed me to set my own hours. I repaired telephones and lines for the MIT Dormphone system, which placed a phone in very dorm room―nothing now, but a big deal then.

Plus, The Tech, the MIT student newspaper, “set type” for MIT departments and outside organizations, using student labor. A real accordion job, which could shrink or grow as my need for money shrank or grew.

One conspicuous absence from this list is an experience most people who work summers share: retail/food service. I could not be happier that my sole retail experience was one four-hour shift at the MIT Potluck Coffeehouse in MIT’s Stratton Student Center. That was more than enough retail for me.

Peckarsky for Senate News

News of Peter Peckarsky's quest for the Wisconsin U.S. Senate Seat: (downloads a PDF file)

Front Page Coverage

Also: Peckarsky filed a Notice of Claim with Wisc. Atty. Gen Josh Kaul asking that the Wisconsin Elections Commission de-certify all voting machines and go to 100% verifiable, most accurate, most trustworthy system: Hand Marked, Hand Counted Paper Ballots. Underlying this filing: his belief that there hasn't been an election that was legal under the Wisconsin constitution since 2008.