Reptiles

Reptiles
Silly Grins

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Fodder for Thought: A Few Days Before Yesterday’s Headlines


A few days ago, I found myself looking at two titles on the screen, side by side.(The titles, not the pictures. They came later.)



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Craftsman makes two violins from pine tree debris in disaster area 

 

One question: Will someone be playing one of those in Tokyo when the big one hits? 

 

 

Can’t decide which heading this gets filed under:

Politely Losing One’s Mind
Politely Loosening One’s Mind 

Pine... like the violins.

Note to self:
Some say the only difference between a fiddle and a violin is how they are played. Perhaps it all comes down to social milieu.

5 comments:

  1. LOL @ "loosing" ;)

    Is it really a phenom? Not tooo much coffee :)

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    1. Though I’m no barista, for the loosing phenomenon to be observable, the brew ratio’s gotta be well into the espresso zone.

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  2. Well now, there are two ways of taking this -
    http://www.snopes.com/music/artists/bell.asp

    One is that we are indeed incapable of recognising artistry and beauty when it is right under our noses. This is undoubtedly true. The other interpretation is that, after a certain point improvements and subtleties are so minor as to be practically non-existent. Extremes are ignored because they are basically just imperceptible. Baseball players claim to watch the ball onto the bat, even though this is physiologically impossible. So this is true as well.

    The third option, of course, is to chuck it all in and make your horse a senator. Though I may me slightly confused about that.

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    1. Two ways of taking it…

      When our priorities have us hustling through life (at perhaps an insane pace), maybe to get somewhere (like ahead of the game), we tend to overlook what is right in front of us. Incapable of recognizing beauty? No…maybe just not attuned to it.

      “After a certain point improvements and subtleties are so minor as to be practically non-existent”… depends on how a person defines practical. To a person in a hurry to ‘get somewhere’, probably not. Its almost as if the faster-paced (some might say numbed) a person’s life is, the less subtleties are needed in terms of time allowed to stop and really smell the roses. The faster-paced life becomes, the more we only react to extremes (like a meltdown, tsunami, or whatever) where anything else is in-between and therefore doesn’t matter.

      When my world becomes a binary ‘either or’, I tend to slow down and attempt to recalibrate. When people only give themselves two ways to ‘taking it’, those are restrictions I am not necessarily comfortable with, however practical.

      When the article to which you refer first came out, I followed a discussion that seemed to do a fairly decent job of thinking critically about the topic and the way the study was set up. One of the tangents dealt with the art of busking as well…

      As for being able to ‘intelligently’ take part in another thread of that discussion:

      http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

      Quite frankly, I might worry if you actually follow the link and read it all. On the other hand, that might mean that you have time.

      Most importantly:
      As for making horses senators, I would say that’s a good idea as long as the senators can be made horses and the races be televised. The only downside is that I doubt senators are as palatable as basashi… which isn’t saying much.

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    2. Just got the Caligula reference.

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