Category: *heh*

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Why Did I Not Realize This Before Now?

Somewhere around 50 years late? *sigh*

OK, I was a fairly bright (never so-called “genius” level bright, but not intellectually dim, either) teenager. Oh, I was completely clueless, ignorant and could almost be classed as a zombie in all regards except for intellectual curiosity. A genuine nerd before such things were so labeled. An Odd, if ever there were one. I did have friends, but that’s ALL due to their friendliness (well, perhaps save for another Odd I connected with due to his parents’ long-standing friendship with my parents, and their awareness of our similar Odd-ness *heh*).

So, there I was at fourteen pitching the idea that my parents spend some of “my” money (long story involving an insurance settlement for injuries directly and completely caused by a neighbor’s stupidity and paid for by their car insurance) to buy a set of The Great Books of the Western World. Sold it. They bought the set. It thereafter “lived” by my bed until I got married, its authors works my constant companions.

Slide ahead a year from the purchase. I had just about completed a recovery and rehabilitation from the damage done me by “New Math”–said rehabilitation at the hands of a great math teacher (thank you, Mrs. Heinz, wherever you are!) via a year of high school geometry. Maths became enjoyable again. And then. . . Newton’s Principia Mathematica, though not in Latin (a language I still have no real facility with). Why not? It was really just an extension of geometry, since ALL Newton’s development of calculus in it were geometrically-inspired, driven, and derived. Oh, I won’t say I mastered Newton’s developments as an autodidact at the age of fifteen. No, I certainly did not, but. . .

Fast forward to my first year of calculus class. The teacher drew me apart after the first exam and required me to retest on the material, using different test problems, because I had scored 100% without writing in any of the intermediate steps between problem and answer, and I could offer nothing except, “Well, it seems obvious.”

So, retest. Same results. Puzzled him, and even I was puzzled as time went on and I saw other students I knew were brighter than I was have to work through the steps.

Just this evening, prompted by a mention of Newton’s approach to calculus in a novel, I recalled how much fin working through Principia had been a couple of years before that calculus class and the light dawned: I wasn’t just “seeing the answer” through some sort of intuitive insight. No, it was just the echo of having played around with Newton a couple of years before.

Now, I’m not as mentally sharp in intellectual pursuits as I was when I was a teenager, but I still enjoy working through concepts, and yes, even maths, to arrive at new and interesting ideas or learn new things about, well, just about anything. I’m still curious and enjoy poking the bear of my ignorance, prodding it into learning something new, so at least I still have that. No, I don’t learn languages as easily as I once did, and yes new concepts take a wee tad more effort to work out than I recall once being the case, but such things are still fun.

Still, why the heck did it take something like 50 years for me to make the connection between playing with Principia and the way calculus seemed so easy? Cluelessness. *heh* I still got it!

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Well, Glad That’s Settled. (I hope. . . )

Watching a Holmes rerun–actually a pretty “not all that bad” show. (The “Mary Watson, Assassin” episode) Turned to my Wonder Woman and asked her if she had been an assassin all throughout our married life. Glad she said, “no,” (though with a sly smile; what does that mean? *heh*), cos that would’ve required Grand Master level dissimulation. . . 😉

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We Need More “Assisted Living Facilities”

But of different classes.

I think the time has come to establish Assisted Computing Facilities for people who are too stupid to own or operate computers, but who nevertheless own or want to operate them, to live in.

“Here, dearie; let me make that mouse click for you.”

And then, of course, it is long past time to establish Assisted English Facilities for self-made morons who butcher both spoken and written English to live in. ( Yeh, I’m looking at 80% plus of people on social media, bloggers, published authors and their editors, etc.). It’s a HUGE market. Every time some self-made moron butchered the English language in speech or text, that moron would have his own “editor” to slap him on the knuckles with a ruler and berate him with a correction. The morons would never learn, of course, but the individual “editors” would at least enjoy themselves.

The problem *sigh* with the Assisted English Facilities would be finding enough people who are actually literate in English. Oh, well.

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It’s. . . the little things

1981-1989 was consumed by work. I paid attention to “news” only whenever it had strictly local or serious national import, so I missed ALL details surrounding news of a serial killer’s apprehension in 1988–an event that might have been interesting to me. . . had I caught a few pieces of information–because it wasn’t of local or national importance. Yeh, yeh, it was news, but not really in any way important except to the community where it happened. (Network–and now cable–“news” manufactures national “importance” to local stories all the time, but it’s a fake “importance”.)

What was interesting to me, years later when I learned about details, is that the guy started his killing two years after I had moved from the area where he was operating. “The area”? I once lived four blocks from the house where the guy lived and killed, just barely out of the “good part of the ghetto” (as it was often referred to by its denizens). When we (my Wonder Woman, our daughter and I) moved from the area, we were living in the “good part of the ghetto,” five blocks away from the (future) “kill house” and working (my Wonder Woman and I; our daughter was not yet a year old *heh*) three blocks from where the guy ended up killing six men.

Missed it by that much.

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A Reader’s POV

I read a lot of books, by most folks’ measures. In the last few years, the mix has skewed more strongly toward fiction, partly as a result of reading so many articles and blog posts online–a real mixed bag of (mostly) non-fiction. I do still read non-fiction books, though, although the mix there is tending more toward DIY books of various kinds, now, with fewer and fewer sci-tech, philosophy, history, and suchlike.

How many is “a lot”? Generally more than one/day, a little more than twice as many as the average American reads each year,* according to some, but nothing to brag about. The only reason I say as much is that I think–perhaps–I have some sort of feel about what’s being published nowadays, both from “traditional” publishing and “indie” publishing, and I have to say, it’s mostly crap.

You read that right. I read more than a book a day, but I start and “circular file” at least 2 more that aren’t worth my time. And what makes them not worth my time?

  • jejune plots, characters, dialog, and narration that could be better done by the average lobotomized fifth grader
  • execrable English: everything from words misused (MANY of them!) to grammar apparently straight from a reference titled, “Stupid English for Stupid People”
  • an insulting lack of homework/research done and overall dumbfounding ignorance about topics keyed to plot or characterization (example: when a writer doesn’t know the difference between a semi-automatic firearm and a revolver but is writing a character whose weapons proficiency is key, it’s insulting)
  • baffling, completely, totally and absolutely stupid lack of internal agreement: Hey! That truck the character is now driving was a mini-van on the previous page!

And that’s just considering the fiction. On non-fiction, consider instructions in a DIY book to do things on a project in a way that WILL NOT WORK, CANNOT WORK, ARE COMPLETELY STUPID. Insulting the reader or targeting stupid people as the writer’s intended market? Either way, crap.

And no, let me repeat: these issues are not limited to “indie” books. The standards for both text and editing in books being published–by whatever means–is in the toilet nowadays.

But. . . of the books I give a shot at my eye time, one in three is still worth reading, so there’s that. *sigh*

Still, that’s slightly better than the one in five or six links to new (to me) voices on the Internet that are worth reading. That’s ~16%-20% of the links I follow from articles, searches, etc. Not bad, really, when talking about the interwebs. So, why I expect better from published (by whatever means) books? Because these writers expect to be paid for their writing. If they’re going to be paid, they ought to make sure they have the chops to write well and they ought to do their homework and PAY FOR LITERATE copy editing and line editing, since few writers are capable of performing those tasks themselves. (I have read advance reader copies–pre-editing–from a few writers that are remarkably clean, well-edited already by the writers, but such writers are few and far between.)

Note to writers: LEARN how to write. If you want to write in English, LEARN THE LANGUAGE. No, growing up speaking it doesn’t count. READ a LOT of well-written text. Concentrate on writers who can really write. No, not writers who write like you do. (In another recent post, I suggested a couple of writers whose command of English exceeded that of 99% of writers today. That sort of writer.) From there, proceed to writer who really challenge you, but STAY AWAY FROM SUCKITUDINOUS FICTION! After a few years focused on well-written text, then try writing again. Next: Find editors/proofreaders outside your circle of friends and acquaintances, editors/proofreaders who are more literate, better-read than you are. Pay them what they’re worth to fix your crap.

That might make an otherwise bad piece of dreck worth reading, IF you do the rest of your homework and either have an interesting story to tell or a useful skill to impart.

Maybe.

One of the funniest/stupidest things I’ve seen in a recent “slush pile reject” was a repeated misuse of “ridden,” as in “the bullet-ridden car” referring to a car that had been thoroughly riddled with bullets. A sure sign of an a-literate writer whose exceptionally weak verbal vocabulary exceeds that of his reading vocabulary. The rest of the thing wasn’t any better, but I did waste 20 minutes on it, just to be as fair as possible.

*Excluding those who claim to have read no books, the average read (by those who have read any books at all) is generally reported as ~7. Oh, no reference/link? Use your search-fu, Grasshopper. 😉

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Musings. . .

“Civil Rights”–it’s a strange and highly loaded term. My own history with the term has been mostly as an observer. . . And “racial tension”? *sigh*

My maternal grandfather grew up “hardscrabble poor”. His family consisted of him, his father, and his mother. They lived as sharecroppers, growing tobacco in a county that had been shattered along a “North/South” fault line of sympathies, splitting communities and families, and the 30 that had lapsed between the end of Mr. Lincoln’s War and my grandfather’s birth had not healed all wounds.

So, divided communities, hardscrabble poverty, competition at the bottom of the economic barrel between poor “whites” and poor “blacks” for subsistence living: all just parts of his daily life growing up.

And then his father died, forcing him to leave school early to support his mother.

Between those early years and when I came to know him as a child, a lot of water under the bridge, a lot of growing. Yes, to his dying day he maintained some of the biased views that formed him as a child (don’t we all?), but. . .

When I spent summers with my grandparents as a child–one set and then the other–I experienced more education in life than in all my years of schooling. Some of the days I shadowed Dad-Dad at work (he was by that time a Southern Baptist pastor, and had been for decades), I didn’t give a thought to the things I learned, though they were planted deep within me. One of the things I learned unconsciously while shadowing him was learned during his perambulations downtown, visiting folks, mostly business people and their employees, in the area where his church was located. I didn’t think a thing about it at the time, but a couple of decades later, one of those business people brought it all back to me.

But before then, while in grad school, I lived and worked in a neighborhood its denizens labeled amongst themselves, “The Good Part of the Ghetto.” All my neighbors and friends in the area (save for a little “white” lady in her 80s who lived a block south of me and a Vietnamese family several houses north) were “blacks”. It was where I lived and worked. They were my neighbors. It just seemed natural to be friendly with friendly folks.

Several years later, I reconnected with one of Dad-Dad’s friends, while I was working with my Dad selling insurance and servicing clients’ needs. Part of that was simply calling on referrals clients made. One of those referrals led me to one of the two funeral homes that serviced mainly black folks in the community. I recall very clearly the moment the owner shook my hand and said, “You were that little boy that visited with Dr. Tom, weren’t you?”

Now, this man and his family had never been members of Dad-Dad’s church. He was “black,” Dad-Dad was “white”. Both had grown up in, frankly, bigoted environments. When I was a young lad visiting around with Dad-Dad, racial tension was rife.

This man and Dad-Dad were simply friends. As things progressed, I ended up having more referrals from that contact than any other in town. Why? Because my raised-to-be-a-bigot grandfather. . . wasn’t by the time he was my grandfather, at least not by the standards of his friend and his family and friends, all of whom remembered him with appreciation, at the least.

How did this color my own upbringing? Well, as I said, racial tensions were rife, in those days, but I never really noticed (I was just a clueless kid, after all, and the only black folks I knew were Dad-Dad’s friends), until I was laid up in the hospital for a month with little to do. . . and a black and white TV on the wall that could tune in soaps, game shows and. . . breaking news reports about civil rights clashes.

Blew. My. Mind. I had never been aware of racial tensions before. As I said, the only folks the prominent bigotry of the day was most likely to see as “other” were just like Dad-Dad’s friends, as far as I could tell.

Even before The Speech, family and life had just drilled into me the precept: People simply ARE NOT “by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” It’s just the way it is.

But yes, I have experienced racial bigotry–some by direct observation of both “whites” and “blacks” and some by angry, unthinking blacks who DGARA about anyone else’s character, just the color of their skin. But examples of racism personally observed or experienced have been rare for me.

I suppose nowadays, I am some sort of “racist” for embracing the concept of looking at people as people, members of the human race and not just this or that “race” based on physical attributes. *sigh* I look at or hear or read people who view “race” as the defining characteristic of a man’s existence as mentally and morally stunted, so in today’s parlance, yeh, that makes me a “racist.”

I don’t get it. Oh, I do understand that such stupidity exists–I’m not in denial–but it baffles me. Maybe I’m just to old to get it. . .

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TRIGGER WARNING

Everyday, ordinary, normal, quotidian English vocabulary composed of words anyone with active brain cells can access may be used on this blog. This may offend or cause some weak-minded subliterate morons to get the vapors. And I DGARA.

Thatisall.