Only He Who Attempts the Absurd Is Capable of Achieving the Impossible

Once upon a time, I wrote a blog post about quotes.  I sort of imagined it would end up being a thing I’d come back to again and again over the years, but, suprisingly (at least to me), that post is now over 12 years past.  Oh, sure, I’ve used quotes in many posts since then, but only a few have been really solid “quote posts”: there’s one on individuality, and two focussed on particular human quote generators—one on MLK, and one on H. L. Mencken.

If you didn’t already click on all those, let me just sum up by reminding you that I have a “quote file,” which I curate with any interesting quotes I find, and my computers spit them back out at me randomly.  Recently, I got this quote:

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

And I immediately got excited about the possibility of bringing in several other quotes which talk about contradictory thoughts, such as one by Whitman, one by Emerson, and one by Stephen Fry ... and then I realized that I’d already written that post.  Which was a bit deflating.  Reminds me of another quote:

When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened.  It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it.

— Mark Twain

Of course, I was somewhat heartened by the fact that the quote that provided the inspiration was not, in fact, used in that post.  Why not, I wonder?  Well, that post was from a while back as well—over 8 years now—so maybe I just hadn’t found the quote yet at the time I scoured my quote file for that topic.

So, were I to rewrite the post without sufficient research, not realizing that I’d already written it, it wouldn’t be the same.  It would have different quotes (at least one more, and probably one or two less as well), but, more interestingly, it would have a completely different point.  That post was about consistency and self-contradiction; the one I was going to write today was going to use the cognitive dissonance of apparent self-contradiction as a back door into the topic of paradox, which is one of my favorite concepts to write about, but which I haven’t done in a while, so it would be a refreshing return to form.  Reminds me of this quote:

You can not step twice into the same river, for other waters are continually flowing on.

— Heraclitus

Because the quote file is continuously evolving, you see ... as are my thoughts on the meanings of the quotes, and my outlook on life, and all manner of things.  The universe is in constant flux, as this quote reminds us:

With every passing hour our solar system comes forty-three thousand miles closer to globular cluster 13 in the constellation Hercules—and still there are some misfits who continue to insist that there is no such thing as progress.

— Ransom K. Ferm (an imaginary person invented by Kurt Vonnegut)
opening epigram of The Sirens of Titan (1959)

So I not only get older and therefore more likely to repeat myself, but also I, and the entirety of the world around me, are constantly changing and evolving, meaning that, even when I repeat myself, I’m unlikely to say the same things in the same way.  It puts me in mind of this song:

I remember when the world was a little girl,
Every corner turned leading back to her,
Flowing like a stream on a rolling stone,
Certain there was nothing changing ...

— Alison Moyet, “Changeling” (The Minutes, 2013)

That one’s a bit more abstract, but I think it captures both concepts, and the inherent paradox, quite nicely.

This quote business can become a bit recursive, actually.  How about this one?

If you don’t know where you’re sailing, no wind is favorable.

Here I’m quoting B. Dave Walters, from episode 50 of Writing about Dragons and Shit, from July 6th of this very year.  But, then again, B. Dave is actually quoting Seneca the Younger’s “Letter LXXI: On the supreme good,” from Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium, and what he actually wrote was:

errant consilia nostra, quia non habent quo derigantur; ignoranti quem portum petat nullus suus ventus est.

which translates more directly as “Our plans miscarry because they have no aim; when a man does not know what harbour he is making for, no wind is the right wind” (at least according to Wikiquote).  And that of course put me in mind of another of my favorite quotes:

A ship in a harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships were built for.

Probably just the similarity in nautical themes.  But I can’t take those two and build a blog post around them either: I’ve already written a post centered around the whole ship in a harbor thing too.  Which I of course had also forgotten, that one being about 10 years ago ... I would lament that “I’m getting too old for this shit,” but apparently I already wrote that post too—including another quote, even.  Did I start out this post by saying I hadn’t really written a lot of quote posts?  Man, I really am getting old ...

We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.

— George Bernard Shaw

Then again, I haven’t really stopped playing.  But perhaps Shaw wasn’t really talking about growing old so much as “growing up,” which is truly a fate worse than death.  If you’ll allow me the indulgence of a self-quote:

”... but then I grew up.” — The good face one puts on when confronted with the tragedy of having irretrievably lost some essential facet of one’s childhood.

Of course, others have put it better.  Here’s one from one of the special features on the Finding Neverland DVD:

Don’t grow up.  Never be a grown-up.  Be an adult; be mature ... but don’t be a grown-up.

— Dustin Hoffman

Finding Neverland, of course, being a movie about J.M. Barrie, who, as the author of Peter Pan, had quite a few interesting ideas himself about “growing up.” Here’s one of my faves:

If I were younger, I’d know more.

— James Barrie

But life goes on, and things keep changing.

The problem isn’t change, per se, because change is going to happen; the problem, rather, is the inability to cope with change when it comes.

— Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained

One has to adapt to change.  Adaption is a learned skill; it only comes with age.  Sadly, age can also make it more difficult to be malleable in one’s thinking.  Youth has its advantages:

The error of youth is to believe that intelligence is a substitute for experience, while the error of age is to believe experience is a substitute for intelligence.

— Lyman Bryson

So I suppose age has its advantages as well.  Age nearly always brings experience; experience hopefully brings maturity; maturity typically brings wisdom.  The key, I think, is to keep on learning.

Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous.

— Confucius, Analects 2:15

Of course, the learning has a tendency to lead to paradoxical thinking (so there’s our backreference to paradoxes).

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.

— Bertrand Russell

And doubt is ... troubling.

Doubt is not an agreeable condition, but certainty is an absurd one.

— Voltaire

Voltaire, of course, was a famous philosopher, who is quite often quoted to help us understand our world.

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.

— Karl Marx

There’s that “change” word again.  This post is a bit circular, I suppose.  Ah, well, as another philospher once said:

You win a few, you lose a few.  Some get rained out.  But you got to dress for all of them.

— Satchel Paige

So, at the end of the day, when I wonder why I keep writing this blog, when I can barely remember what I’ve done already and what I haven’t, I come to the conclusion that I keep doing it because I love writing.  And, as the man who will soon be Maryland’s first black governor once said:

Every day you’re doing what you’re not passionate about, you become extraordinarily ordinary.

— Wes Moore, quoting a mentor of his

Pursuing your bliss is something I’ve striven to do, and striven to instill in my children.  When it comes to children, I’ve always been a bit inspired by Frank Zappa.  His youngest once said:

We were free to say whatever we wanted—there were no “bad words,” except if you used them intentionally to hurt somebody.  We could go to bed whenever we liked, and I would play in the rain for hours in my underwear—it didn’t matter, and it was fun.

— Diva Zappa, to The Guardian
on the occasion of her father’s 70th birthday

And I’ve tried to live by that.

Well, this post about quotes has rambled far and wide, and definitely didn’t end up where it started.  I don’t know if it has a particular message, but it does hit a lot of the important aspects of quotes I’ve touched on before: that they are distillations of wise words, regardless of who originally spoke them; that there are often multiple quotes that say the same thing, or come at the same topic from multiple angles; that they are repeated and transmogrified and requoted.  They come from disparate sources: in this post, I’ve quoted books, songs, interviews (both written and spoken), movies, podcasts, textbooks, and myself.  They often have uncertain attributions—the Vonnegut quote is to this day still often attributed to the entirely fictitious Ransom K. Ferm, while the title of this very post is often attributed to M.C. Escher (for obvious reasons), and occasionally to Einstein (for slightly more obscure motivations), but is actually Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno (at least according to the ever-excellent Quote Investigator).  And I’m quite proud of the fact that, even though I once joked that “all quotes in the history of man were either spoken by Confucius, Voltaire, or Mark Twain, and which one your quote was spoken by only depends on how old you’d like to pretend it is,” this post quotes all three of the great luminaries of the quotiverse, and I’m fairly certain that all three are actually attributed correctly.

Still, the lack of an overall message sort of bugs me.  Perhaps I can fall back on a line I heard in an episode of a Japanese anime that I watched once with my eldest child when they were probably around 7 or 8.  One does not expect to find deep meaning when essentially watching cartoons with your kid, but occasionally serendipity and epiphany align.  So, if there is a message here, perhaps it’s this:

We’re all alive for a reason.  Find out why.

— Gojyo (Saiyuki: The Journey Begins, “Where the Gods Are”)

To be silent ...

It is far better to be silent than merely to increase the quantity of bad books.
— Voltaire (maybe)

Way back in my first ”nothing to say” post, I used this quote, which is commonly attributed to Voltaire.  It applies again to today’s post, and I (again) made an attempt to source the quote, and once again I failed.  Wikiquote refuses to source it, and Quote Investigator hasn’t tackled it yet.  GoodReads says he said it, and they’re usually pretty reliable, but then again they also usually provide a source, which they don’t here.  AZ Quotes is usually not reliable, but at least they give a source: The Portable Voltaire, although I’m not sure if I can consider that an authoritative source.  Still, as I said last time:

But, you know, it can be true even without being famous.
— me (definitely)

And, it is true.  So I shall be silent.

The Waning of the Year

In this time of year’s end and family coming together, I remind you of something Dean R. Koontz once wrote: “for in your family you saw, day to day, those specific things in specific people that justified, by extension, a broader love of fellow men and women.”

Hold your family close.  Because they will teach you how to love the rest of the world.

Final surrender to the CBS machine

When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy.  The networks have conspired to dumb us down.  But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true.  The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want.  That’s a far more depressing thought.  Conspiracy is optimistic!  You can shoot the bastards!  We can have a revolution!  But the networks are really in business to give people what they want.  It’s the truth.

        — Steve Jobs, Wired, Feb 1996

We have finally given in and are paying for CBS All Access.  This was a difficult decision for us, and one that we resisted for a long time.  The situation is that the big broadcast networks are still struggling to figure out how they compete in today’s streaming world, and CBS, alone of the original three, has decided to start its own streaming service.  The problem, though, is that, at least currently, with CBS All Access you can either get a reasonable fee or you can get no commercials.  On the one hand, I have a severe problem with paying people to show me commercials.  If I’m paying a monthly fee, I expect it to be commercial-free.  But, on the other hand, I kind of have a problem paying CBS the same monthly fee as I would a premium movie channel: CBS All Access at current monthly prices is just a dollar more than I was paying for Showtime, and more than I’m currently paying for Starz.  That’s crazy talk.

But, it is true that there’s a new Star Trek out, and there’s only one place you can watch it.  It’s just that that in itself is not enough.  Oh, sure: there’s The Good Fight, which I suppose I’ll watch now that I’ve bitten the bullet, but it definitely wasn’t tempting enough on its own.  Being able to watch regular CBS shows without commercials is no draw: I can do that with my DirecTv, a DVR, and a fast-forward button.  Now, I could theoretically replace my DirecTv with a streaming solution, part of which would be CBS All Access, but last time I investigated that, it wouldn’t save me any money at all, and it’s not like I hate DirecTv or anything, so eventually I figured, why bother?

But now the second season of Star Trek: Discovery is starting, getting good reviews, and continuing to star Sonequa Martin-Green, who we loved in The Walking Dead.  So we are masticating the metal projectile, for better or worse.  And, since CBS All Access plus DirecTv is more expensive, it’s likely that soon we’ll be cutting the cable/satellite cord altogether.  Still not sure I agree that we’re better off this way, but at least the first couple of episodes of the new Trek were pretty damned good.

While perusing the vast quantity of shows available, I was again a bit disappointed.  In some cases, all the seasons are available.  For instance, if I wanted to watch the reboot of MacGuyver, I could do so: all 3 seasons are right there.  On the other hand, let’s say I finally wanted to give in and watch The Big Bang Theory.  Nope, out of luck: only the last season is available, and why would I want to jump in at the end?  (Well, assuming it ever will end, which perhaps it won’t.  But you see my point.)  Most of the older shows have a complete back catalog: feel like reliving the bizarre 80s phenomenon that was Beauty and the Beast?  All 3 seasons are right here.  And, as near as I can tell, every episode of every season of every Star Trek series is here—even Star Trek: The Animated Series.  So there’s 7 shows you could binge your Trekkie heart out on.

But, percentage-wise, there just ain’t a lot here worth watching, if you want my honest opinion.  I blasted through the first (and only, so far) season of Instinct, and I might try Salvation.  And/or Scorpion.  But, overall, not a lot going on, especially given the price.

I will endorse Instinct though.  Essentially, it’s a retooling of Castle:  There’s the tough, sexy female cop, played by an actor whose name you don’t recognize of Serbian descent raised in a former British colony still nominally ruled by Queen Elizabeth (yes, the two principal females leads really do have that much in common).  There’s the charming-though-somewhat-egotistical male civilian who gets paired with the cop even though the cop really should have an actual cop partner and not this “consultant” who is constantly getting put in harm’s way and exposing the city (New York, in both cases) to levels of legal liability that would get any actual politician who approved it fired on the spot.  But they go around solving crimes, having met because of a serial killer who patterned their murder spree on one of the male protagonist’s books but somehow even after that’s over they’re still “partners” for some reason, and it’s serious, because it’s a cop show, but it’s also fun, because one of the “partners” doesn’t have to follow the rules and can afford to be somewhat silly.  The female cop, of course, is a compulsive rule-follower.

And, if I stopped right there, you would assume that Instinct is just a rip-off of Castle, and perhaps you would decide it wasn’t worth watching.  But there are two issues with that.  First off, Castle is a good enough show that even a rip-off can be fun.  It’s only light entertainment, sure, but there’s certainly worse things on television.  And the other thing is, instead of Nathan Fillion having a big crush on his female cop partner, Alan Cumming is a happily married man.  A happily married gay man, even, which firmly puts the kibosh on the romantic angle right off the bat.  Which is nice, in a change-of-pace way.  It’s also nice to see Alan Cumming, who is himself a married gay man, get to play a married gay man, which is a role I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him in before.  Also nice to see his character having a very normal, loving relationship with his husband on a show where the fact that he’s a gay man has nothing to do with the actual plot.  Plus, Cumming’s character isn’t a useless mystery writer: he’s a former CIA agent and current professor of abnormal psychology, which makes him way more useful for actually solving the cases.  It’s a bit like Castle was injected with a spot of Criminal Minds.  Now, I’m not saying the show is perfect by any means—when the writers finally do decide that they just can’t stand having a female protagonist who’s not madly in love with someone any more, the romance comes so far out of left field that it will have you yelling “what the actual fuck???” at your television screen—but it’s a fun little time-waster, and, if you like those sorts of not-too-serious cop shows (like Monk, or Psych, or Death in Paradise, or, yes, Castle), you’ll probably enjoy it.

Gone But Never Forgotten

Tomorrow we celebrate the birth of a man who was instrumental in the development of modern America.  Unlike many years, this year Martin Luther King Day is actually on King’s birthday: Januray 15th.  Most years I celebrate very simply, by just reflecting on the words and the life of Dr. King, and typically listening to “Southern” by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark.  Obviously Dr. King’s life can’t really be reduced to 3½ minutes of a song by a synthpop band, but I always found OMD’s tribute moving nonetheless.

Toward the end of 2016, I did a blog post where I shared a few quotes from Jesus, and I noted that, regardless of whether you believed in his status as Messiah and Savior, his words were still powerful.  Dr. King holds a similar position in my mind: you may not agree with everything he stood for, but even if you agree with our current president that Nazis can be good people too, or you’re a little nostalgic for the “good old days” of separate-but-equal, it’s still hard to ignore powerful statements like the following.  Here are my favorite quotes from the man:

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

I submit to you that if a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.

We must either learn to live together as brothers or we are all going to perish together as fools.

One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?”  The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust.  I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws.  One has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws.  Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.  I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

It’s wrong to hate.  It always has been wrong and it always will be wrong.  It’s wrong in America, it’s wrong in Germany, it’s wrong in Russia, it’s wrong in China.  It was wrong in 2000 B.C., and it’s wrong in 1954 A.D.  It always has been wrong, and it always will be wrong.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

So, tomorrow, I’ll reflect on these words, and be happy that my three little (and not so little) children can live in a nation where they are exposed to ideas like these, where words such as these are considered important enough that we set aside a day to contemplate them.  We’re all benefitting from Dr. King’s dream.  Obviously we still have a ways to go before we get to the promised land, but I do believe we’re on the path.  And we have one man, and his relentless dream to thank for it.

So, thank you, Dr. King.

If I Were Talking with Chris Hardwick

I used to hate “talk shows” when I was younger.  I still do hate most of them.  But more and more I find that I enjoy watching certain people ask questions of people that I know the work of (be that musical, cinematic, or what-have-you).  I have some vague thoughts on why that is, which will perhaps become its own blog post one day.  Today, though, I wanted to chat briefly about one such certain person, mainly to use that as a springboard for a whole ’nother topic.

This certain person is Chris Hardwick.  So far I’ve watched every episode of his new show, titled simply Talking with Chris Hardwick.  I didn’t actually expect to enjoy it, but I figured, I loved @midnight, and I enjoyed Talking Dead (and the far more occasional Talking Preacher), so why not give it a try?  And I’ve actually liked it quite a lot.

This has a huge amount to do with the fact that it’s Chris Hardwick asking questions.  I enjoyed Jon Stewart interviewing people, and I continue to enjoy Stephen Colbert doing the same.  Once upon a time I was really into Inside the Actor’s Studio with James Lipton, and I’ve even listened to quite a few episodes of Fresh Air with Terry Gross.  What all these people have in common is the ability to ask interesting questions, the sort of questions that you wish you’d asked.  Often the sort of questions that you didn’t even know you wanted to know the answer to before it was spoken aloud, but now that it has been you’re really desperate to hear the response.  And they’re all interesting people themselves, people who can interject their own stories without taking over the conversation, which is a tricky thing to manage.  An interviewer who talks about themself too much instead of letting the guest talk is annoying, but an interviewer who just asks question after question without throwing in their own 2¢ every now and again is boring.  It’s a delicate balance, and these are the folks who get it right, at least for me.

One thing that Hardwick does that reminds me (fondly) of Lipton is that he ends each interview with the same format.  In Lipton’s case, it was the long-form Proust Questionnaire.  Hardwick takes a simpler approach, and just asks a single question: what’s one piece of advice that has always inspired or helped you, that you might want to pass on to other people?  He rearranges the wording every show, but that’s the gist of the question, and I think it’s a good one.  His guests have had some interesting answers.

And, to once again quote Bill Cosby,¹ I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Sometimes when I watch or listen to one of these shows, I imagine how I might answer the interviewer’s questions.  I’ve come up with answers to Lipton’s whole list, at various times.²  So, the other day, after watching eleven episodes of Talking, I started to wonder what my answer to this question would be.

Of course, I couldn’t have a simple one-line answer.  Like everything I write, or say, or think, the full answer is more complex.  But, if I had to boil it down to a one-liner, it would be this:

Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.

Now, this is generally attributed to Confucius, but that’s mainly because all quotes in the history of man were either spoken by Confucius, Voltaire, or Mark Twain, and which one your quote was spoken by only depends on how old you’d like to pretend it is.³  But it doesn’t really matter who said it; it’s a pretty little nugget of wisdom regardless.

It reminds me of something I read on Bruce Campbell’s website.  Now, if you visit his site today,⁴ it’s all slick and commercial and bleaugh.  But once upon a time it was all dorky and stripped down and black and white and blue, mostly consisting of big walls of text and looking like he slapped it together himself.  (Which I suspect he did.  For the record, Mr. Campbell, I liked it better before.)  But it had some cool shit on it.  Like this quote, which I immediately stole for my quote file:

I just love acting.  I can never understand why more people don’t make their hobby into a career.  Sure, it’s unpredictable, but no job is 100% secure these days anyway.

— Bruce Campbell

Ain’t that the truth.  And it perfecty dovetails with my personal experience: I ran my own company for years, and it was not always fun, and it was never easy, but I loved it.  I loved what I did, and I loved all the people I did it with,⁵ and I loved being able to set my own schedule, and I loved being able to say “no” to work if it offended my sensibilities, or if the customer skeeved me out, or whatever.  I loved being the conduit for other people coming to work every day and loving it.  I loved being in charge when I wanted to be and making other people be in charge when I didn’t.  And, even after I stopped running my own company and went to work for someone else, I still loved it.  I’ve had pretty decent luck picking great companies who respected me and trusted me and gave me freedom,⁶ and I tell computers what to do for a living, which I find to be creative and satisfying.  I love my job, and I think I’ve had success and happiness because of it.

But it also occurred to me to contrast the Bruce Campbell quote with another quote from another screen star—in this case, Mike Rowe, famously of Dirty Jobs.  And here’s what he had to say on this topic:

The idea that there’s a perfect job is really comforting ... but dangerous, in the same way that there’s a perfect soulmate. The guys I met on Dirty Jobs, and the women, by and large, were living proof that the first thing to do is to look around and see where everybody else is headed, and then go in the other direction. The second thing to do is embrace the thing that scares you, frightens you, or otherwise makes you blanch. The third thing to do is to become really really good at that thing. And then the final thing, the thing that makes really happy people happy, is to figure out a way to love it.

— Mike Rowe, Ask Me Another, 5/20/2016

Now, I have to tell you that, at first, I hated this quote.  It seems to be saying the exact opposite of what the Bruce Campbell quote was saying.  Instead of “follow your passion and turn that into your career,” it says “find a career that nobody else wants and then learn to love it.” That didn’t feel right to me ... at first.  But then I realized: it really is the same thing.  Either way you get there, you arrive at loving what you do.  In the end, does it really matter which route you took?

So I think this is the heart of the advice: love what you do.  Whether that means to take what you love and do it for a living, or whether it means to throw yourself into what you do so hard and so thoroughly that you come to love it, the point is that, when you love going to work every day, you’re a happier person.  When you dread it, it’s hard to be happy with everything else you have in life.  If your work makes you miserable, you’re going to be miserable, and also you’re going to make everyone around you miserable.  That’s no way to live.

But when you love what you do, every day is like a gift.  Oh, sure: you don’t always love every day—you don’t always love every gift you get either.  There will be bad days among the good, sure.  Days when you come home and you’re just tired, and you don’t want to think about anything.  But those are the exceptions.  Most days, you get to work and you see a bunch of people that you like (or at least ones that you don’t mind tolerating for the bulk of your day), and you sit down at your desk (or whatever workstation your job demands), and you do something fun.  And even when it’s frustrating, or it pisses you off, or it makes your brain hurt, it’s still fun anyway.  And one day you wake up and realize it’s been years, and that you’re still happy, and then you think about what it might have been like if you’d just done a job all those years for nothing but a paycheck, and you’re glad you didn’t have to find that out.

So, Chris Hardwick: that’s my piece of advice, the thing that inspires me, that I think would be useful for other people.  Love what you do.  It’s always worked for me.

Next in the series, I’ll essay Mayim Bialik’s “Rapid Fire.”

__________

1 Who has become a much more controversial figure since the last time I used this quote.  To the point where some may say I should not continue to use it.  Obviously I’ve decided to do so anyway.  Not because I’m a Cosby apologist—on the contrary, I’m quite disgusted by the whole situation—but rather because I don’t believe that the bad that people do erases the good.

2 For the record: I’ve decided my favorite curse word is “fucksticks.” But it’s a tough choice.

3 For an excellent breakdown of the possible origin and certain popularization of this quote, the excellent site Quote Investigator will hook you right up.

4 No, I won’t link you to it, as I didn’t the last time I mentioned his website in a footnote: see my open letter to Wil Wheaton.

5 I mean, of course I did: I hired ’em all.

6 Which you may recall is, according to me, the 3 things that employees want.

More quotes for our time

I had really hoped to get you a full post this week—I even started on one already—but the tyranny of the birthday weekend has other plans for me.  For now, I’ll give you another quickie quotes post.

Amongst the great quotables, everyone knows Voltaire and Mark Twain, Confucius and Ghandi.  Most know Will Rogers and Oscar Wilde, Ambrose Bierce and Dave Barry.  But not enough people know H. L. Mencken.

Ever heard of the Scopes Monkey Trial?  Well, Mencken is the one who named it.  He was an American newspaperman and author who was most prolific during the period of World War I to World War II, but many of his quotes ring true today with a foresight that is almost eerie.

Of course, he was not a perfect man, as no historical figure is.  As his Wikipedia article is quick to point out, he was extremely racist, and he once wrote “war is a good thing.”  He also didn’t believe in populism and was quite a big fan of Ayn Rand.  Which makes it all the more curious to me that his words are such a clear indictment of our current president, who it seems he probably would have personally thought well of.  For instance, he once noted:

It is [a politician’s] business to get and hold his job at all costs.  If he can hold it by lying, he will hold it by lying; if lying peters out, he will try to hold it by embracing new truths.  His ear is ever close to the ground.

    — H. L. Mencken, Notes on Democracy, 1926

Of course, one could argue that Trump doesn’t have much truck with embracing truths, new or otherwise.  However, it is true that Trump has an amazing ability to tap into people’s fears: economic fears, xenophobic fears, isolationist fears.  And, of course, Mencken has a comment for us on that too:

Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.

    — H. L. Mencken, In Defense of Women, 1918

Again, this is highly amusing, given Mencken’s personal views: one could easily imagine that he would have been fully in favor of, say, bans on refugees.  But PolitiFact rates the commonly touted opposition statistic that your chances of being killed by a refugee are 1 in 3.6 billion as “mostly true,” primarily because the statement should more properly be considered to be “your chances of being killed on American soil by a refugee in an act of terrorism are 1 in 3.64 billion per year.”  Still pretty low.  And, while it’s true that the study this is based on excludes the 3 people that died in the Boston Marathon bombings because those perpetrators were not refugees but rather their family has been granted political asylum—an admittedly nitpicky distinction—it’s still a wash because the only people that the study could identify as having been killed by terrorist refugees were 3 people killed prior to the 1980 Refugee Act, which radically increased how hard it is to get refugee status.^*  So I think it’s safe to call this fear of refugees, which is being masterfully played on by Trump and many other politicians, as imaginary.  As Democratic Congressman Ted Lieu pointed out when he originally trotted out this statistic, your chances of being struck by lightning twice is 1 in 9 million.  You know, just for comparison purposes.

Given the recent WikiLeaks dump on the CIA’s ability to turn your televsion into a listening device, I found this one pretty spot-on as well:

Moreover, this gradual (and, of late, rapidly progressive) decay of freedom goes almost without challenge; the American has grown so accustomed to the denial of his constitutional rights and to the minute regulation of his conduct by swarms of spies, letter-openers, informers and agents provocateurs that he no longer makes any serious protest.

    — H. L. Mencken, 1920

Ah, if all we had to worry about were letter-openers.  Those were truly the good ol’ days.


I’ll leave you with that thought for this week.  Next week I hope to have a more regular post.

__________

* Also, classifying those incidents as “terrorism” is a bit dicey, and 2 of the 3 people killed weren’t American, although they were on American soil at the time.

A quick quote

Partially due to the prior craziness of this month not having completely abated yet, partially due to a somewhat exhausting trip to Disneyland this week, and partially due to coming into our March birthday season, there’s no time for a full post this week.  However, I will give you a partial post by sharing one of my many favorite quotes.

When it comes to non-fiction television, there are only a few shows that I regularly watch:

• The Daily Show (with Trevor Noah)
• @Midnight (with Chris Hardwick)
• The Late Show (with Stephen Colbert)
• Last Week Tonight (with John Oliver)
• Full Frontal (with Samantha Bee)

That’s it.  No reality TV, no sports, no cooking shows,^* no travel shows, no talk shows, no hard news ... outside of the occasional nature documentary or science show with my kids, there ain’t nothing else.  And you can see the pattern here: these are all shows where I can find out what’s going on in the world, but they make me laugh at it instead of depressing the hell out of me.

Of course, the first 3 of these also have guests: often celebrities of some type or other—actors, directors, musicians, politicians, sports stars—but sometimes less well-known folks, like lesser-known authors, activists, historians, political commentators, or journalists.  I have an interesting take on the celebrities,^** but the other guests are usually more intriguing.  They’re typically people I’ve never heard of before (unless they were previously guests on one of the other shows), and they often have really interesting stories, which they have a few minutes to spit out on the air in ultra-condensed form, and sometimes they say very cool things.  Here’s a quick example.

Wes Moore is a fellow that Wikipedia describes as “an American author, social entrepreneur, producer, political analyst, and decorated US Army officer.”  The man has done a veritable shitload of things in his less-than-40 years on the planet, and he’s quite an impressive guest on a show like those I mention above: knowledgeable, articulate, and passionate.  On February 4th of 2015, Jon Stewart interviewed him on The Daily Show.  You can watch the entire clip on the Internet if you like,^*** but for purposes of this quick post I want to just mention one thing he said:

Every day you’re doing what you’re not passionate about, you become extraordinarily ordinary.

    — Wes Moore, quoting a mentor of his

As I sometimes do when I hear a quote worthy of capturing, I had to stop (in this case, pause the DVR) and digest that for a minute, then back up and transcribe it, going over and over it several times to make sure I had it down exactly.  ‘Cause that’s just damned inspiring.  I have tried to focus my life on doing things that I’m passionate about, and I hope I’ve managed to instill that in my children as well.  But I have never been able to say what Wes Moore said so succinctly or clearly: don’t waste your time on things you’re not passionate about.  Don’t even bother.  Because that’s how you fade into obscurity, and perhaps even worse: that’s how you deprive the world of your talent.  I thank Mr. Moore for sharing his wisdom with me.

Which I’ve now passed on to you, in case you missed it the first time around.  Hopefully it will inspire you as it has me.  Until next week, go out and do something you’re passionate about.  I plan to as well.

__________

* I used to watch Good Eats, but it’s not on any more.  And Iron Chef, in most all of its incarnations.  But I gave up on cooking shows.

** Which is probably worthy of its own blog post someday.

*** And if you can stand to deal with Comedy Central’s horrible player, which generally I can’t.

My mind is on the blink

Due to a rather intense project at work, I don’t have the time (or energy) for a proper post this week.  I suppose I could give you an improper post, but I don’t feel like that either, really.  Although I suppose one might consider this post quite improper, depending on one’s point of view.

This week I had one day which started at 10:45am and went until about 3:30am, the only real breaks being driving to and fro and a fairly leisurely lunch.  I always say that I don’t mind doing a long night at work every now and again, as long as it doesn’t become a habit.  For this job, it’s the first time in 2½ years.  If it’s another 2½ years before it happens again, that’ll be just about the right frequency.  Hell, I’d even consider a shorter interval: every 2 years is okay, and even once a year isn’t that bad.  This job happens to have a hell of a lot of other advantages, and plus I actually enjoy this sort of thing every once in a while.  It’s sort of like staying up all night in college, working on a group project with your classmates that you absolutetly postitively have to turn in the next day.  It’s sort of fun, and you get all loopy and silly towards the end, and everyone drinks and smokes (or at least doesn’t care if you do), and you play loud, thrashy music to keep everyone energized.  The work thing is kind of like that, only with less drinking and smoking.  But they did let me play some loud music, so that was nice.

Again: as long as it doesn’t become a habit.

So I’m taking yet another break this week, and, as I do, I will leave you with these words of wisdom that I recently read by a fairly famous programmer in my chosen language, Mark Jason Dominus (generally known in the Perl world as simply MJD):

A smart programmer requires only ten years to learn that you should not do things the wrong way, even if you are sure it will not matter.

Words to live by indeed.

All work and no play is pretty much the same as all play

I’m doing some work this weekend, so I’m not doing a normal blog post.  Let me stress that this is not like a Lumbergh type situation.  In fact, this job has been quite courteous of my weekends, especially compared to $last_job.  So when something comes up and I know that people would be inconvenienced if I didn’t work on it over the wekend (which happens pretty rarely), I actually want to put in the extra work.  Plus I love what I do, so then is it really work?  As Confucius (supposedly) said:

Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.

Of course, saying “I love what I do” is not the same thing as saying “I love my job,” but, as it happens, I do that as well.  I don’t know that I could describe it as a perfect job, but I also don’t know what any of my bosses could give me that they haven’t already, so perhaps that’s as close to perfection as makes no never mind.  In my blog post about what employees want, I said that the most important things are respect, trust, and freedom, and I have those in spades.  So it pleases me to do nice things for those I work for, and it’s fun, so sometime I do a little extra, if the mood strikes me.  Which, this weekend, it has.

So I’m going to go immerse myself in some Perl code and try to accomplish a few things to make my coworkers’ lives easier.  Perhaps next week I’ll be inspired to write a more complete post.

Obstreperousness as a Virtue

I am sometimes a giant pain in the ass at work.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not always a giant pain in the ass.  Often I’m quite pleasant.  Sometimes I’m even agreeable.  But occasionally I lock into stubborn mode and I won’t let go of a point of view, even when I’m hopelessly outnumbered.  When one is younger, one can look upon one’s obstinacy as persistence, can see refusal to compromise as being a bastion of integrity.  Of course, as one gets older, one realizes that they’re really both the same thing.  And, once you realize that every good quality you have is also a bad quality, sticking to them no matter what because they’re “the right thing to do” doesn’t fly any more.  You need better justifications than that.

Thus I keep examining my own motives in an attempt to figure what makes me tick, even though I know that’s doomed to failure.  In fact, on this very topic I’ve already waxed authorial not just once, but twice.  I’m not saying either of those posts are wrong now ... just that I continue to look for something more, even more to help explain my behavior.

The first time I concluded that I hate seeing people make what I think is a mistake, and that’s a part of it.  Maybe a smaller part than that post made it out to be, but it wasn’t a completely useless observation.

The second time I talked about my number one source of frustration in the corporate world.  That’s still relevant too; in fact, at work this week I trotted out that very same story to tell my coworkers.^*  But I still think there’s more to be teased out here.

After quite a bit of reflection, I’ve come up with this:  I figure if you’re going to hire someone like me—by which I mean someone with this much gray in their beard who is this much of a pain in the ass—then you do it for two reasons: you want my experience, and you want me to be vocal about it.  If you didn’t want my experience, you could hire someone younger.  And if you didn’t want me to be vocal about it, you could definitely hire someone who was a lot easier to put up with.

Hiring someone for their experience means hiring them for their mistakes.  As a popular quote tells us:

Learn from the mistakes of others.  You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.^**

So, if you’ve hired me, and you’ve kept me around for a while, and you genuinely seem to value me, then I assume that you want the benefits of my mistakes, and you want me to let you know in no uncertain terms when you’re about to repeat one of them.  And to keep on letting you know if you continue to keep on trying to make that mistake.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying you always have to agree with me.  In fact, I think it’d be pretty disastrous if everyone always agreed with me, or always agreed with anyone.  Difference of opinion, as I am fond of saying, is what makes the world go ‘round.  Which is to say, the world would be a pretty boring place if we all agreed on everything.  And how would we ever learn anything without other people challenging our assumptions?  No, if I’m saying that me disagreeing with you is a good thing (which is what I seem to be saying, if I’m saying that my pointing out that a plan of yours may be a mistake is valuable), then I have to accept that you disagreeing with me must be an equally good thing.  In the big picture, I mean.  On any given point, I’d really prefer you stop disagreeing with me and just do as I advise.  But, overall, I can accept that, some percentage of the time, you’re going to disagree with me, and, some percentage of the time, I’m going to lose that fight, and, overall, that’s good.  But I think there are different ways to disagree.

For instance, if I say “if you do this, things could go wrong” and you (“you” in this scenario are my boss, remember) say “yeah, they could, but the rewards outweigh the risks” ... well, that’s a tough argument to beat.  Maybe we can debate the value of the rewards a bit, or the seriousness of the risks, but in general if you know the dangers and you’re willing to risk them for whatever the upsides are, I can’t argue with that.  Business requires risk.  Opportunities have costs, and sometimes you just have to pay them.  You roll the dice, pray the worst never comes, but, if it does, you just deal with it.  Because it was worth it.  If you don’t take risks in business, you get left behind.  Rapidly.

On the other hand, if I say “if you do this, things could go wrong” and you say “nah, I don’t think they could,” or perhaps “well, they could—after all, anything could happen—but the chances are so low it’s not worth worrying about” ... if you say that, then I may just have to dig in.  Because what I’m telling you is, here’s a mistake I’ve already made.  I’m not talking about some theoretical consequence here: I know it can happen because it already happened to me.  I’ve lived through this, at least once (and, the older I get, the more likely it was more than once), and the resulting unpleasantness is burned into my memory, and I’d really prefer not to suffer through it again, thankyouverymuch.  This is why I also tend not to accept an answer of “yes, that could happen, but that’s okay; we’ll just deal with it.”^***  ‘Cause, trust me: if it was no big deal to “just deal with it,” I would not be doing my giant-pain-in-the-ass impression.

Now, let me stress that I’m not unhappy with the way the these sorts of debates are unfolding at my current job.  In fact, curiously, the fact that the discussions have been so reasonable has been the impetus for my meditation on why I get so stubborn.  In past jobs, the pain of beating my head against a brick wall has somewhat dulled my capacity for self-reflection.  In this job, I have some confidence that the folks who hired me can and will take my obstreperousness in the spirit in which it is intended.  Still, I think it’s worth exploring why I feel so passionate about some of these positions, and examining which circumstances trigger my response and why.  Even it’s only for myself.  Because I think that understanding ourselves is one of the hardest things to get right, but one of the most worthwhile endeavors we can undertake.

__________

* If they would just have the good grace to read this blog I keep telling people not to read, I wouldn’t have had to retell the story.  But one can’t have it all, I suppose.

** Like many quotes floating about the Internet, this is attributed to a bewildering multitude of people, including Martin Vanbee, Sam Levenson, Hyman Rickover, John Luther, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Groucho Marx.  Most of whom I have no idea who they are.

*** This was the favorite tactic of my previous boss.

Worth Striving For

A few days ago I was talking to the CEO of my company about why I love this job so much.  I found it hard to put into words ... the best I could come up with was that I had finally found a job where I was allowed—even encouraged—to fix things.  At my last job (and at many of the companies I’ve worked for, both as employee and contractor), if you wanted to fix something that was broken or ugly, you had to have meetings about it, and you had to present business cases for it, and you had to prove to someone that it was going to make money (or save money) in some way.  At the new job, if something’s broken (or ugly), we just say: fix it.  And no one tells you how to fix it.  They just trust that you will do it the best way you know how.

Trust, you may recall, is one of the three cornerstones of what employees want, according to the Barefoot Philosophy.  So that’s a big part of the attraction, certainly.  But this is a bigger issue, touching on the concept of craftmanship that I brought up before, but only scratched the surface of.  I’ve also made a business case for why crap needs to be fixed, but this is a different side of that coin.  And I wanted to expand on this topic, partially because it would be nice to tie all those disparate thoughts together, but mainly because I was frustrated by my inability to capture the gestalt of this idea in that extemporaneous discussion with my chief executive.  But of course I’m not good at speaking off the cuff.

Then again, that’s why I have a blog.

Perhaps the easiest way to explain it is with an extended analogy.  Imagine software developement as being like building a house.  Now, there are different aspects of home construction.  Obviously the most important aspect is functionality: you need working plumbing, a sound electrical system, structural integrity, and so forth.  But never discount æsthetics.  Nobody wants to live in an ugly-ass house.

Of course, the vast majority of the coding that we programmers do is not building a new house—it’s renovating.  The house is already there when we show up; the owner just needs some repairs, or perhaps a new bathroom, or maybe even a whole new wing added on one side.  It’s often said (even by programmers) that programmers prefer writing new code to maintaining old code.  There’s some truth to that, of course.  But not as much as it seems on the surface.  There’s nothing wrong with working to maintain a beautifully built, solidly constructed old house.  Sure, you can’t go crazy and go all Frank Lloyd Wright or John Lautner on it.  The basic layout is there, and there’s only so much you can do to it.  But the popularity of home improvement shows—from modern reality TV shows like Extreme Makeover: Home Edition to the public television classic This Old House, which is still on the air after 35 years—shows us that fixing up an existing structure can be interesting, challenging, intellectually stimulating ... all the things you could ask of a construction project.  I’ve worked on a few old codebases that were still a lot of fun and gave me plenty of opportunity to exercise my creativity and leave my mark, including the one I’m working on now.

But most of them aren’t like that.  Most of them are a kind of horror show train wreck.  Which is something we all end up slowing down to watch, with a guilty sort of fascination, but it’s quite another thing to be inside it while it’s happening.  Is it any wonder that most of us are desperately trying to rewrite parts of—if not the entirety of—our old codebases?  And the reason most of them are so awful is because of this very issue that I’m trying to explain.

See, working at my last job (and, as I say, for many of my previous employers) was a bit like doing a renovation for a homeowner who tells you “Just make sure the toilets flush, and the lights come on when you hit the switch, and the walls don’t fall over.  We don’t really care if it looks pretty or not.”  Which doesn’t sound so bad until you start getting into the details of it.  “Just patch the pipes with duct tape,” they tell you.  “Yeah, we know it’s not waterproof, but a few little puddles here and there are no big deal, and actually replacing the bad plumbing would take too long and be too expensive.”  And then they say, “You know what? just leave those exposed wires there.  We’ll put up some signs warning people not to touch them.  Actually patching the drywall is too much trouble, and we’ve got other stuff for you to work on.”  And then it gets to the point where they’re trying to convince you to prop up the walls with old two-by-fours from the backyard that still have rusty nails sticking out of them.  You can probably imagine how scary it is to walk into a job like this.  But what many people forget about is how utterly depressing it is to be the guy who let things get this bad.  Not by choice, of course.  But, if no one will let you fix anything ...

Part of the reason this is so frustrating is that some of this shit is actually dangerous.  Show me a programmer who hasn’t been told to ignore a bug that they knew was screwing over customers and I’ll show you a programmer at the start of their career.  Every business makes that choice, and I will even admit that it’s not always the wrong choice.  A bug that only affects a few customers but will cost many engineer-weeks to fix is not a sane thing to tackle.  But it’s one thing to make that call one time, and quite another to make it over and over again.  And let’s not dismiss the soul-crushing anguish of the raw ugliness of it all: you’re embarrassed to admit you were a part of the crew, and you’re constantly apologizing for your part in the mess.  Hell, it doesn’t even stop when you quit: at my most recent conference, I was still apologizing to employees that had been hired by my ex-employer after I left.  “We tried to make it better,” I would say, eyes downcast.  “But we just didn’t have the political capital.”  That’s a polite way of saying “our bosses wouldn’t let us fix anything.”

So it may sound a little weak to say “I really love my job because they let me fix things,” but try to understand it from the opposite point of view: I really hate a job where they won’t let me fix things.  It’s depressing to have to work in that environment day after day.  And, if there are any businesspeople out there reading this, let me try to put this into terms you can appreciate: this is a question of retention.  When you refuse to let people fix things, you make them miserable.  Oh, I can tell you that there are direct fiduciary benefits to a culture of improvement (and that’s true, although they’re notoriously hard to measure), but the real gain is that you keep your best, most productive employees happy, and you make it easier to hire more of the same, and if you can’t see how that is going to help your bottom line, then there’s nothing more I can say.  Here’s a great quote attributed to Hosea Ballou:

No one has a greater asset for his business than a man’s pride in his work.

I suspect this is how my CEO views it.  I don’t know for sure, because he hasn’t told me, but I’m guessing that he thinks to himself, well, my tech team always delivers when I ask them to, and sometimes even when I don’t, so if they want to go off and fix things I didn’t ask them to, and that makes them happy, then, more power to ’em.  As long as we keep doing the things that make him happy, and make the company money, he’s happy enough to let us take a little pride in our work.

And that’s what it comes down to, in the end.  I consider myself a craftsman, as I said—perhaps I should go even farther, as did web designer Richard Glover, and call myself an artisan.  I take great pride in what I produce, and I need to be producing things I can be proud of.  Give me a job that allows that—nay, encourages it—and I’m all yours.

A Reflection on Self-Contradiction

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. [Emerson]

No doubt you’ve heard this quote before, although some people seem to miss the “foolish” part.  Emerson isn’t bagging on consistency here.  What he’s talking about is dogma: getting stuck on an idea and refusing to let go, even in the face of contradictory evidence.  Perhaps it would help to look at the context of the quote:

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.  With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.  He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall.  Speak what you think today in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.

‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood?  Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh.  To be great is to be misunderstood.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson, from Self-Reliance (1841)

What Emerson is advising is to admit when you’re wrong.  To embrace change, even in your own mind, and to refuse to look back and second-guess yourself.  To be completely comfortable with contradicting yourself.

I especially love how he says that a foolish consistency is “adored by little statesmen.”  If you follow politics even casually (which is about all I can stand to follow it, myself), you know that if a politician today dares to change their mind, their opponents will leap on them instantaneously.  “Flip-flopper!” is the typical epithet.  Refusal to compromise one’s principles has become a virtue, although refusal to compromise should probably not be a virtue in politics no matter what exactly one is refusing to compromise.  But, if we look back to Emerson, we see that those who do not “flip-flop” are employing a foolish consistency, which then speaks volumes about the volume of their brainpower.

Of course, the smart guys aren’t typically the ones we elect.  Adlai Stevenson is a great example.  He’s famous for two things: being intelligent, articulate and erudite, and failing to get elected to the presidency despite trying 3 times in a row.  Stevenson once said to reporters:

Isn’t it conceivable to you that an intelligent person could harbor two opposing ideas in his mind?

Stevenson here goes a bit beyond Emerson, who talked about believing something today that was the opposite of what you believed yesterday.  Stevenson takes the next step and is perfectly willing to believe two opposite things at the same time.  For a Baladocian such as myself, this is an attractive proposition.

Of course, we needn’t limit ourselves to politicians—poets have weighed in as well.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

— Walt Whitman, from Leaves of Grass, “Song of Myself” (51)

In just a few words, Whitman takes aim at why we contradict ourselves, and why it’s perfectly acceptable to do so.  The landscape of the human mind is vast, Whitman says.  Just as one vista may contain both mountains and canyons, both ocean and desert, so too does a person contain many ideas which are antithetical to each other.  This often leads us to feel conflicted.  We should not.  We should embrace the paradoxes in our nature.  Stephen Fry (who is neither a politician nor a poet, but easily as eloquent as either) puts it thus:

So we have first and foremost to grow up and recognise that to be human and to be adult means constantly to be in the grip of opposing emotions, to have daily to reconcile apparently conflicting tensions.  I want this, but need that.  I cherish this, but I adore its opposite too.  I’m maddened by this institution yet I prize it above all others.

— Stephen Fry, BAFTA speech, 2010

Oscar Wilde (once portrayed by Stephen Fry, perhaps not coincidentally) was, as usual, more succinct:

The well bred contradict other people.  The wise contradict themselves.

And now we’ve progressed from self-contradiction being acceptable, through it being something to embrace, and ended up with it being a sign of wisdom.  Sort of makes you want to start contradicting yourself right away.

Or maybe not.

At the bottom, I think all of these great speakers were saying something about the human condition.  Which is perhaps all that any writer—whether of essays, plays, poems, speeches, or merely witticisms—wants to do.  You can write things that sound pretty, but unless there is some Truth in it, it won’t have much lasting impact.  We all search for insight, both internally and externally, and the thing we most wish to be revealed is ourselves.  It’s difficult to understand ourselves from within ourselves, just as the classic fishbowl analogy teaches us.  Those folks outside the fishbowl have a much different perspective than those of us for whom 115.5 cubic inches of water are our entire world.  So we want those people who have the ability to express themselves with some flair to express something about ourselves that we can’t see from inside.

Of course, we also hate to be criticized, for other people to point out our flaws.  Yet I think we crave it at the same time.  Just another example of our inherent tendency toward self-contradiction.

I know personally that I hate to be wrong.  Sometimes I’m accused of hating to admit that I’m wrong.  But that’s not the same thing at all, and I don’t believe I have the latter problem.  To work hard not to be wrong—to attempt to forge the future in such a way as to be as good and right as you can manage—is admirable.  To refuse to admit you’re wrong—to deny the immutable past in which everyone already recognizes your folly—is just self-delusional.  So is it self-contradictory to work overtime to prevent the future mistake, while simultaneously being completely comfortable with those in the past?  Perhaps.  If so, I don’t particularly care.  I’ve been wrong many times in the past, and I know I’ll be wrong many more times in the future.  That doesn’t mean I have to accept it meekly.

Willingness to accept your mistakes is also part of being human.  To consult one last great orator:

I am human, and I make mistakes.  Therefore my commitment must be to truth and not to consistency.

— Gandhi

Mohandas K.Gandhi often changed his mind publicly.  An aide once asked him how he could so freely contradict this week what he had said just last week.  The great man replied that it was because this week he knew better.

— a Detroit News editorial

Indeed.  This week, I’m ever so much smarter than I was last week.  Last week I was a moron.  By next week, I shall be a genius.  I’ll be different, but I’ll still be me.  Misunderstood, multitudinous, opposing, conflicted, occasionally wise, always human.

What Morris Wrought

So, this week I’m going to talk about the titles I came up with for my 13-part blog series on my relationship to Perl that I did on my Other Blog.  When you do a long series like that, you have a number of challenges: presenting the topic concisely, laying the groundwork for the following week, the simple grind of cranking out the next 1500 words.  But there’s also the issue of coming up with titles.  Naming things is hard.  In my technogeek life, it’s probably the thing that we fight most about.  In fact, there’s a famous quote we’re wont to trot out at times:

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. —Phil Karlton

Sometimes you see people online wondering why this saying is famous: naming things is easy, they say.  These are invariably young programmers who have never had to deal with users who can’t understand why a feature doesn’t (or can’t) work because they’re confused about what it is because it’s so poorly named.  Or the pain of having to use a word in one sense when talking to sales (because they use the industry standard definition) and a different sense when talking to fellow techies (because they use the literal meaning) and an altogether different sense when talking to management, because they use a completely arbitrary defintion that they got from the guy before the guy before the guy before you, who was invariably a young programmer who didn’t understand that naming things is hard.

So, yeah: coming up with good names for things is hard.  Coming up with consistent, good names for things is harder.  Coming up with consistent, good names for things 13 weeks in a row is very difficult indeed, and so hopefully I can be forgiven for doing only a mediocre job of it.

The first two or three came to me fairly naturally, and they established the pattern: quotes, either direct or paraphrased, that referenced different cultural things.  These might be songs, poems, television shows, movies, quotes by famous people, or whatever.  Several of them were as easy as the first few; some of them were so hard that I almost spent longer searching for a good title than I did writing the post in the first damn place.  Some of them are so obsure I don’t expect anyone else to know what the hell I’m on about; some were obscure enough that I didn’t know them myself until I Googled them for the purpose of the series.

Here’s the 13 titles I came up with, along with the hints I gave out last week.  Honestly, some of the hints are fairly obscure as well, but I didn’t want to make it too easy.

1. The Road So Far: a Winchester recap
2. The Power of OOP: Johnny Colla would have done a mean sax solo
3. A Møøse Once Bit My Sister: I apologize for the obscure references; those responsible have been sacked
4. A Worthy Program, Exceedingly Well Read: also, profited in strange concealments ...
5. Speaking with the Speech of Coders: a present from Vietnam
6. Perl is Engineering and Art: what’s to learn? it’s a snake ..
7. The Most Powerful Weapon Which You Can Use to Change the World: according to Tata, not Perl at all ...
8. Endless Forms Most Beautiful and Most Wonderful: there was grandeur in his view of life from the Beagle
9. That’s Why I Failed Recess: it was funnier when Rudy said it to Fat Albert
10. What We Talk About When We Talk About DWIM: involving two couples and a bottle of gin
11. Please Mr. Perl, Will You DWIM?: a plea to m’colleague Hugh
12. The End of the Beginning: once described as “sounding more like the Primitives than the Primitives”
13. Here’s to Future Days: why are they called “twins” if there’s three of them?

Now let’s look at which each one references, as well as discussing its relevance to the particular post it ended up tagging.

The Road So Far

This is what they put on the title card when they do a longer recap on the TV show Supernatural.  The card looks like this, or maybe like this.  The protagonists of the series are the Winchester brothers, thus this is “a Winchester recap.”

This was a fairly natural choice for the first post in the series, which told a highly abbreviated version of my programming life, from age 14 or so, up to the present.  It’s a cool reference if you get it, but it still works well if you don’t.

I think a lot of people think of Supernatural as a teeny-bopper series, probably because it’s on the CW along with other teeny-bopper series like Gossip Girl, or The Vampire Diaries.  Of course, I was watching Supernatural when it was on the WB ... which was the home of Charmed and Dawson’s Creek, so I suppose I’m not digging myself out of that hole very well.  I dunno; I suppose it is a teeny-bopper series in many ways, and it’s probably gone on far beyond when they should have called it quits, but I still enjoy it.  Call it a guilty pleasure.  Besides, every now and again Felicia Day shows up, and that just makes it all worthwhile.

The Power of OOP

My second post in the series was about object-oriented programming, or “OOP” for short, and what makes it so useful.  So it seemed natural to harken back to Huey Lewis & the News’ classic 80’s song, “The Power of Love”.  The hint refers to the great sax player of the News, Johnny Colla (who was also a co-writer of “The Power of Love,” as it happens).

I’m not actually a huge fan of “The Power of Love,” nor its companion piece “Back in Time,” both off the Back to the Future soundtrack.  As far as I’m concerned Lewis & the News peaked with Sports, and it’s all downhill from there.  By the time Huey was declaring that it was “Hip to be Square,” I was embarrassed to admit that I’d ever seen them live.  (But I did, with Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble opening, and it was a great show, I gotta tell ya.)

A Møøse Once Bit My Sister

No self-respecting programmer should have missed this one, which is of course is a reference to the ultra-classic Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  As you probably know, all the credits of the film are at the begining, and the Pythons couldn’t let it get too boring, so they peppered it with lots of moose references (for whatever reason).  The title is a direct quote from the credits, and the hint is a paraphrased version of a later credits quote.

For a post extolling the virtues of Moose, but also lamenting a few of its warts, there was no way I could pass up this title.

A Worthy Program, Exceedingly Well Read

This is one of the ones I spent a lot of time trying to find a good reference for.  The post was about legibility: the idea that a good program should be able to be read like a good story.  After several fruitless Googles, the phrase “well-read” popped into my head.  I wondered what the origin of that phrase was.  Of course, if you’re a native English speaker and you spend any time at all poking at the origins of common phrases, you know what the answer is 80-90% of the time: Shakespeare did it.

As it is here.  I paraphrased the relevant bit for the title, and I used the surrounding context for the hint.  Here’s the full text, from Henry IV, Part 1:

In faith, he is a worthy gentleman,
Exceedingly well read, and profited
In strange concealments, valiant as a lion
And as wondrous affable and as bountiful
As mines of India.

This is Mortimer speaking about Glyndwr, whoever that is.  I never read Henry IV, personally.  Still a good quote though.

Speaking with the Speech of Coders

Every once in a while we Americans wake up out of our egocentricity and remember that not all our blog post readers share our Western heritage.  By this point in my blog series, I felt it was time to pick a reference from the other side of the world.  I spent some digging through the Tao Te Ching, which is normally my go-to source for pithy quotes from the Orient.  I poked around The Art of War and Hagakure, both of which I also like, but they weren’t very helpful for this post, which was about linguistics.  I think I even explored the Analects briefly, but I lean much more towards Taoism than Confucianism, as you might imagine of one so obsessed by balance and paradox.

Then suddenly, after long and futile searching, it hit me: I already had a great source which would be perfect for this.  “The Red Cockatoo” is a short poem by Chinese poet Po Chu-i (also romanized as Bai Juyi), who lived in the Tang Dynasty and is very popular in both China and Japan (at least according to his Wikipedia page).  There are several different translations, but I prefer the one by Arthur Waley, the great British sinologist who gave us excellent translations of both the Tao Te Ching and the Analects.  Here it is in its entirety:

Sent as a present from Annam
A red cockatoo.
Coloured like the peach-tree blossom,
Speaking with the speech of men.
And they did to it what is always done
To the learned and eloquent.
They took a cage with stout bars
And shut it up inside.

Beautiful, and piquant.  The hint refers to the fact that “Annam” is an ancient Chinese name for Vietnam (or part of what is modern Vietnam).

Perl is Engineering and Art

This one was obvious to anyone who read this particular post, which spent a good deal of time analyzing a sidebar from the O’Reilly book Learning Python entitled “Python is Engineering, Not Art.”  I almost didn’t use this title, actually, as it’s so much more obvious than all the rest.  But then I decided that this title was just too good to pass up.  The hint is obvious as well, or at least is so in hindsight.

Fun side note: the animal on the cover of Learning Python is a rat.  Write your own joke here.

The Most Powerful Weapon Which You Can Use to Change the World

Another tough one to title.  This post covered several different subtopics that didn’t really fit anywhere else, so there wasn’t a great choice for a title anyway.  One of the topics I covered was my school experience with programming, so I started looking for quotes on education and ran across this one by Nelson Mandela:

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.

There’s a bit of contention on whether he actually said this or not (and whether he used the word “which” in it if he did), but overall it seemed solid enough.

The hint refers to one of Mandela’s nicknames: “Tata” means “father” in Xhosa.  His other nickname is “Madiba,” but some have argued that it’s inappropriate for non-South-Africans to use that one.

Endless Forms Most Beautiful and Most Wonderful

This one was a little easier.  The post was about evolution, so it made sense to peruse the words of Charles Darwin, who was not only a very influential scientist, but also an eloquent writer.  The full quote is:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

This is from the conclusion of Darwin’s seminal On the Origin of Species, and is in fact the only time Darwin ever uses the word “evolve,” in the first edition.  (And, in the second, he added the phrase “by the Creator” to make it clear what he was talking about.)

The hint, of course, is a bit of the quote above, combined with a reference to the famous ship that Darwin sailed on, HMS Beagle.

That’s Why I Failed Recess

The ninth post in my series was about Getting Shit Done, and, when I was trying to think of a title for it, I kept remembering a joke from my childhood.  As the hint suggests, I’m pretty sure the first time I heard it was on Fat Albert.  It might have been Rudy who said it, or then again it might have been Russell—he was always a smartass.  Then again, we’re talking about 40-odd years ago, so I might be misremembering altogether and it was never in Fat Albert at all.

Anyways, here’s how I remember the joke:

A: I don’t play.  That’s why I had to quit school in the third grade.
B: Whaddaya mean?
A: ‘Cause the teacher said “recess,” and I said “no, I don’t play.”

There are countless variations of this joke, including the more concise version I used for my title, used in the common venacular, multiple rap songs, blog posts by other people, Facebook user names, tweets, and Internet memes.  In fact, this is a meme from before we knew what memes were.

Plus it’s really funny.

What We Talk About When We Talk About DWIM

Along about Part 10 I wrote a post that was so damn long I had to break it into two pieces.  Originally the title of this post and the following one were going to be switched, so that the title of this one could be a callback to the mention of “m’colleague” which I had dropped into the text.  (Instead, I ended up using that for the hint for Part 11.)  But eventually I made the switch to the titles that we have now because it just made better sense: this post was a fairly long digression in the form of a story from my college days, and this title fit that perfectly.

The title, of course, is a paraphrase of the title of a famous short story by Raymond Carver, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” as well as the book which contains it.  In the story, two couples talk about everything but love over a bottle of gin (thus the hint), but really love is all they’re talking about.  You see the parallel in my post.

Really, though, I’m not a huge Carver fan.  The best thing about “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” is probably the title.  “Cathedral” is better.

Please Mr. Perl, Will You DWIM?

If you are a connoisseur of Britsh comedy, the television series at the very top of your must-see list is of course Monty Python’s Flying Circus.  After that, it should be The Young Ones and Blackadder, although we might quibble over which one should come first.  Next on your list, before Fawlty Towers, before Red Dwarf, and, yes, even before AbFab, should be A Bit of Fry & Laurie.  If you think of Hugh Laurie simply as House, or (even worse) as the insipid father of Stuart Little, you really don’t know Hugh Laurie (in fact, you may not even realize he’s British).  Likewise, if all you know of Stephen Fry is his voice—he’s the Cheshire Cat in the Tim Burton version of Alice in Wonderland, the narrator of Little Big Planet, and a prolific audiobook narrator, including the UK version of the Harry Potter books and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—you’re missing out.

A Bit of Fry & Laurie is at once similar to Monty Python and also removed from it.  There’s still a certain amount of the surrealism (perhaps a bit less), but very little of the physical comedy such as the Ministry of Silly Walks or the Gumbys.  Most of it was like taking the best verbal humour of the Pythons (such as the Argument Clinic, or my all-time favorite, the penguin on top of your television set) and cranking it up to 11.  Stephen Fry would often do the heavy lifting in such sketches—playing the Groucho, or the Abbot, role—but Hugh Laurie had many talents other than just being an outstanding straight man.  One of which is an amazing range of musical ability: he plays guitar, drums, harmonica, sax, and, of course, piano.  At the end of every show, Fry would turn to Laurie (who he often referred to as “m’colleague”) and say: “Please Mr. Music, will you play?”  To which Laurie would respond by playing the piano in a loungy sort of way, usually while Fry mixed ridiculously named cocktails such as the Swinging Ballsack.  Occasionally he would elaborate the phrase to enhanced levels of flowery silliness; my favorite of these was:

I say, as I like to on these occasions, those six refreshing words that unlock the door to sophisticated evening happiness. I say: Please Mr. Music, will you play?

If you’ve not yet had the pleasure, I highly recommend it.

The End of the Beginning

Here at Part 12 I finally decided to start wrapping things up.  However, I knew it would take me (at least) two posts to conclude satisfactorily, so I needed a title to reflect that.  “The End of the Beginning” is (appropriately) the final track on the sophmore album of the Darling Buds, Crawdaddy.  Although Crawdaddy came out in 1990, it definitely has that late 80’s sound, including a remarkable similarity to the Primitives, particularly their first two albums Lovely (‘88) and Pure (‘89).  Although technically speaking the Primitives were English while the Darling Buds were Welsh.  But to us stupid Americans that subtle distinction is lost.

Although it was a Brit who made the comparison I reference in the hint: specifically, Dave Kendall, creator of MTV’s 120 Minutes.  He made the clever observation in his review of Crawdaddy, and I couldn’t help but agree, even though I probably like the Darling Buds a bit more than the Primitives.  But it’s a close thing.

The first track on Crawdaddy, “It Makes No Difference,” has one of the coolest hooks of the 80’s.  Too bad you’ve never heard it.

On the other hand, if you want to hear this track, YouTube is your friend.

Here’s to Future Days

And finally we reached the end, and I decided to touch on my thoughts about Perl’s future.  The title for this one took absolutely no thinking or searching at all.  While there can be no doubt that Into the Gap is the pinnacle of the Thompson Twins’ career, Here’s to Future Days is also a great album, the last of the good TT records before they transmogrified into Babble (whose debut was better than the last three efforts from the Twins put together ... not that that’s saying much).

Here’s to Future Days was also (probably not coincidentally) their last album as a threesome: it may not have seemed like Joe Leeway was adding much other than standing around looking cool (much as Andrew Ridgely did for Wham!), but apparently that was an illusion, because they sure sucked without him.  Definitely most people think of the Thompson Twins as a trio, and wonder what’s up with calling themselves “twins.”

But of course the truth is the name has nothing to do with the number of band members.  The first (little known) TT album was recorded with four members, and the second featured a whopping seven, before they trimmed it down to the famous three, who would go on to produce the Twins’ three great albums: Quick Step & Side Kick (known simply as Side Kicks in the US), Into the Gap, and Here’s to Future Days.  Nope, the name was simply a reference to Thomson and Thompson, the detectives from The Adventures of Tintin who only look like twins.

“Future Days” is the track on this album that contains the lyrics “Here’s to future days / Here’s to future ways,” which is what I hear in my head whenever I read this title.  If you’d like to have it stuck in your head as well, YouTube can arrange that for you.

In Conclusion

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I spent quite a bit of time mentally wrestling with a title for this post itself.  Should it be some sort of self-referential thing, being that it would be the title of a post about titling posts?  Should it somehow proclaim to the world that it was a meta-title?  Should it be a quote about naming things, or about clever wordplay?

In the end, I decided to make it a shout out to one of my favorite book-gifts as a child.  I got my fair share of fiction, certainly, but my family also recognized that an aspiring writer must have a love of language, so I got a fair number of dictionaries, thesauri, etc.

I was eleven years old on Christmas in 1977, the year that my grandfather presented me with the Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, which had been published for the first time that very year (although much of it was derived from the earlier version, which was similarly titled but without the “Morris”).  It’s a “dictionary” only in the sense that the entries in it are alphabetized.  Lovingly crafted by husband and wife William and Mary Morris, it’s not so much a reference work (although it can be used as such) as it is a mishmash of fascinating tales of how English expressions came to be; I was fond of just opening it to a random page and reading whatever I found there.  I was rarely disappointed.

The Morris’ youngest son Evan carries on the family tradition on the web, writing as the Word Detective.  On his “about” page, he quotes fellow etymologist John Ciardi:

The more words I traced back through time for our readers, the more I appreciated Ciardi’s observation that each word, no matter how humble, was “a miniature fossilized poem written by the human race.”

And that’s what this exercise in naming was like: a verbal archaeology expedition, a paleontologist finding words trapped in amber.  My love for this sort of thing is certainly directly traceable back to the Morris dictionary, and the many hours I spent perusing how words and meanings become bent and reshaped to suit new ends across the generations.  Yeah, I was a weird kid.

So, this week’s installment, while longer than I’d anticipated (and probably longer than you’d hoped), at least may provide some insight into how these titles get here and where they come from, and why I tend to obsess over them more than is probably healthy.  Next week I probably won’t be so garrulous, most likely because I’ll be busy catching up on all the things I didn’t do this weekend because I spent too much time on this blog post.  But it’s been fun.  For me, anyway.  For you ... well, didn’t anyone tell you not to read this blog?