The Tsarnaev Ripple Effect

One of the nastier things that surfaces around any heinous crime is a putrid fascination with sordid details of anything and everyone around those involved-- especially the perpetrators.

In the case of the Tsarnaev brothers, I'm appalled at how their family problems were drug through the mud. It's one thing to note, as we grapple to understand the suspects, that one was arrested for violence against his girlfriend. It's another thing altogether (and a nasty one) to find headlines like, "The Mother Of The Boston Bombing Suspects Was Arrested For Shoplifting Last Year".

As long as they could get away with it Big Media danced around the fact the brothers were Muslim. I saw blog and Facebook posts suggesting that since the suspects were Muslims that explained everything. Both attitudes are wrong. We are perfectly capable of assimilating facts without making judgments. Why do so many refuse to do so?

In both Big Media and on blogs, some were quick to assume it was the work of "right wing extremists", "the Tea Party". and so forth-- while decrying any who would assume it was Muslims or foreign terrorists. Guess what? Any of those is just as wrong as another.

Today (and every day) you have a choice. You can wait for the facts or jump to unwarranted conclusions based on prejudices or feelings at the moment. You can stir up trouble for people or you can show grace and love and try to help heal people and situations.

Any time you throw a rock into water, you get ripples. But if you put up barriers, you can keep the ripples from spreading. If you leave the water alone, the ripples will dissipate. If you throw more rocks in, it just makes more ripples... and squashes life under the surface.

Don't encourage the mess. Don't dig up dirt on people, or listen to it, much less rejoice in it.

Choose life. Choose love.

Real Poo and Green Hair

It's Tax Day, so "poo" seems like an appropriate subject.

A while back I blogged about not putting poo in your hair. There I covered shampoo and no poo, but not real poo. Today I want to talk about all three, with some experience under my bandana on two out of three.

But first, a note about "real poo". I figure if the totally synthesized stuff made from all sorts of scary chemical names is shampoo, then there ought to be real poo, made from natural, scalp friendly ingredients. I wondered why nobody was marketing real poo. Then I thought about the name. I'm a little slow at times.

We'll come back to this and green hair later.

The Experiment

I've stuck as much as possible to the No Poo treatment for almost a year. I cut waaaay back on shampoo, but I work in IT. I can't run around with greasy hair, and left to its own devices, my hair definitely heads that way. Most days I use the baking soda solution on my scalp, as little shampoo as I can get away with on most of the hair, and vinegar solution on the ends. For a while I was pushing my luck, trying to skip shampoo every other day. That seemed to be iffy, but was all over when we went on vacation.

I didn't think ahead of time to plan for hair cleaning while traveling. I make up large containers (old shampoo & conditioner bottles) of the two solutions. These would not travel well without leaking (or bursting open and emptying). So I punted and used shampoo and conditioner for 10 days, losing serious ground.

Results and Thoughts on No Poo

• My scalp doesn't itch! Most shampoos make my scalp itch to some extent. The baking soda doesn't. Even two days of full bore shampoo usage irritates my scalp.
• I can get by with very little shampoo. A normal bottle will last at least a year now. (My wife uses it as her main hair product, so I have no idea how long the bottle would last if only I used it, but certainly over a year.)
• When I don't underdo the shampoo, my hair looks great, and is very controllable. It's super fine and most conditioners leave it either waving in the breeze, or looking plastered down. Vinegar is Da Bomb.
• I still haven't figured out why my hair gets greasy. I am guessing it rubs the scalp, and if the scalp thinks it's too dry, it cranks up the pump on the oil pipeline. Any hair scientists out there?
• The three stage process, and being careful where each part goes, takes a little longer, but not much.
• Keeping the baking soda only on and near the scalp, and vinegar only at the hair ends, is a lot easier if you have very long hair that's pretty much the same length. It's almost impossible with medium length or short hair, especially if the hairs aren't all similar in length.
• My hair dries much faster with vinegar than with conditioner.

Real Poo, Marketing Poop

I tried one brand of shampoo and conditioner a friend recommended. It was supposed to be "organic". And a couple of ingredients were. But others came from the same list of chemicals I find on most hair product labels. Ultimately the one I tried didn't work; it made my hair sticky and clumpy. Not quite oily, more like I had been in a food fight,. And it smelled weird-- "pork chops cooked in industrial chemicals" or something like that.

I may have tried the wrong flavor. There were several types, each for a different type of hair. Unfortunately, none of them were aimed at guys, much less geeks. I wanted one for "oily hair". Apparently I wanted a "full bodied" effect, but that sounded like Farrah Fawcett, so I got the only one that didn't sound like that. I tried it twice and gave up. IT guys are not supposed to come to work straight from a food fight. Especially when they work for the VP of Finance.

Toward Greener Hair

Green isn't really my color. If I dye my hair, purple is far more likely. But I try to be reasonably green ecologically. To this end I prefer not to use a hair dryer unless I have to (very cold weather, have to go straight to somewhere I need to have dry hair, etc.) With medium length hair (about collar length) my hair dries in a half hour most days (just right for my drive to work). With conditioner it used to take twice that. Also, with most conditioners, I had to blow dry my hair or it did Very Strange Things.

Between the chemical changes and the hair dryer, I'm not saving the planet, but it's a part of my part in hurting it less. And it's less expensive. That's the best of both worlds.

A Final Note-- It's Alive! (Not.)

Hair is dead protein. You aren't actually damaging a part of you if you lighten, dye, straighten, or perm it. Unless you do something to destroy the follicles, you'll grow more, and you can cut the old off. In fact, I bet you do already.

It does no good to put nutrients and vitamins on your hair. It's dead stuff, remember? And vitamins don't absorb through the scalp; you have to ingest them. So don't obsess over "hurting your hair" or "keeping it healthy". If it looks good and does what you want (or as close as it ever does) you're golden.

 

So... Can anyone recommend a good, natural shampoo?

Writing 101 - What's a Writer?

So you think you want to be a writer. Or maybe you think you are a writer. Maybe you think you are not a writer.

How do you know? What's a writer?

Let's come at this obliquely.

What is a musician? A person who performs music.

What is a plumber? A person who plumbs.

What is a cook? A person who cooks.

What is a programmer? A person who writes programs.

By ostension a writer is one who... writes.

Some writers hit the big time right away; the first thing they write, or close to it, nets them big bucks and big attention.. Precious few, but some. Most of us start by writing. And writing. And writing.

What both groups have in common is that they write.

We all want to write brilliantly, to craft words in such a way that people are immediately moved, whether to tears, laughter, awe, inspiration, action, or simply to give us money. But for most of us, this means a lot of writing that doesn't do that. It means writing a lot of crap and mediocre stuff. It means practicing, just as a musician practices. It means reading and studying. It means taking risks and letting people read things you aren't sure about. But without writing, none of that happens.

You need to know the basics:

• sentence structure;
• grammar;
• spelling;
• punctuation.

All these are learned. It's easier for some of us than others, but nobody comes out of the womb knowing these things.

But what about compositional skills? What about this, that and the other? What else you need to know will depend on what you are writing. It really helps to know how to tell a story... if you are telling a story. Not everyone tells stories. Poets, especially, may simply describe scenes or objects, or relate feelings, or turn abstract thoughts into concrete (or liquid gold) words. It's good to learn all you can, but if you are writing love poems, or greeting cards, or haiku, you don't need world class compositional skills.

One thing you do need is a mastery of the language[s] you will write in. It may be a formal language, a street language, church speak, technobabble, or marketing buzz, but you need to be fluent. To this end, read, listen, and study. And write.

You can pick a time or grab time. But find or make time to write.If it's ten minutes a day to start, go with that, but find or make more as you move forward. A writer writes. Writing takes time.

Composing things in your head is not writing. Do that if you like, but write it down.

If you don't know what to write about, write anyway. Describe a nearby object. Write down what you are feeling. Capture a moment, whether present or past, or even a possible future. I once started describing a coffee cup, and three pages later realized I had written about feelings I hadn't known I had. Another time I stared with "I don't know what to write, so I am writing about not knowing what to write about, This feels stupid. It's gray out. I feel gray. I remember a song I liked, called 'Grey Day'..." It turned into a story from my hippie days. Just write.

Save everything you write. All of it has value. Fragments may inspire you later. If nothing else, you can look back at it and laugh and realize you have improved. Assuming you have, but if you write you almost certainly will. So write.

If you are still reading, I hope you are inspired to write. But perhaps you think this is too simplistic. If that's the case, I can offer one other piece of advice.

Capture your thoughts via physically transcribed language in the forms of symbols conveying meaning to the eyes in your language of choice. I believe the technical translation of this is, "write".

So go write!

I Am So Over the Whole UFO Thing

The other day someone posted a link to a UFO sighting in east Texas. He was a little excited. I understand; there was a time I would have been, too. After all, I saw a real UFO. I mentioned this briefly in Growing Up Miles, Part 2 on another blog:

"One night mom and I were watching a late night sci fi movie (giant, three legged robots stomping around the desert with death rays, IIRC). There was a commercial break, and we got up to stretch. We wandered to the front door to look out. There was a giant fireball sort thing slowly descending out of the sky behind the Franklin Mountains. This was between midnight and 1AM. Much too big to be the sun or moon, and too slow to be anything falling. Mom and I just stood there until after it was gone. Then we stared at each other, both hoping the other would say something first. When we did talk, we realized we'd each seen the same thing. We could never find anyone else who admitted seeing it. When she called the AFB and army bases, they refused to say anything, just wanted a full report on what we'd seen. So I have seen a UFO. What was it? What does it mean? No idea, the U was very much "Unidentified"! I spent the next couple of years reading everything I could on UFOs and desperately wanting to see more. Finally gave up, never saw anything again."

This obviously glosses over the couple of years I spent researching this. It ignores the fact that every so often throughout the rest of my life, I read about a UFO and dig again, and once more come up unsatisfied.

I grew up with a brilliant scientist and professor of a Father. I also grew up reading both science and science fiction. I got my first chemistry set on my 6th birthday; experimentation, investigation and engineering have been some of my BFFs ever since. I always wanted to KNOW things. What things? Everything. All you scientists and engineers out there (latent or otherwise) get this.

But there was precious little to know about UFOs. There were reported sightings, lots and lots of reported sightings. There were allegedly officially documented sightings by test pilots, interceptor pilots, SAC bomber pilots, commercial passenger pilots, ground RADAR operators, NORAD, and probably bald eagles and seagulls. But almost none of it showed up in major media or anything official an unclassified civilian would ever see. Even the rumors of rumors of official sightings of rumored documents of official sightings were classified. If they even existed. They might be rumors, too.

Nearly the worst thing was that almost everyone who claimed to have encountered aliens seemed to have either gotten an anal probe or been sexually investigated. If there were aliens out there they were at worst perverted, and at best incapable of comprehending human anatomy. While I can understand some mild confusion and possibly disbelief (let's face it, we're laid out pretty uniquely), one would think that a people capable of crossing distances at speed the Enterprise crew only dreamed of could fathom human anatomy fairly quickly. Some of the most damning evidence against UFOs being spaceships was that the alleged travelers weren't curing our diseases, much less giving details on 100MPG carburetors.

But even worse than this was the shoddy reporting, the shoddy evidence (when there was any), and the lack of anything remotely scientific or intellectually useful surrounding any of the phenomena.

So I quit worrying about it. As a Christian, there are really only a few possible answers:

1. There are no such aliens.
2. There are such aliens, and they never fell, so we are probably off limits (C. S. Lewis covers this well in his space trilogy).
3. There are such aliens. They fell, and Jesus died for them or God otherwise provided for them. In that case why are they playing hide and seek?
4. These are demonic manifestations.

I know people who subscribe to each of these theories. But personally, I no longer much care. It's fun to speculate, and UFOs and/or space aliens will likely appear in some of my stories now and then, but... who cares? Either they don't exist, or they are pretty much avoiding us. Unless and until we have verifiable contact of some sort (whether that's an alien making rude gestures at the Hubble, Gort's arrival, or Loki shows up with the Chitauri) there are far more interesting and far better uses of my time.

Maybe some day I'll meet a space alien. If and when that happens, I'll offer a hug. Until then, I'm still offering hugs to any humans who need or want one. You're awesome and loved, and so are the space aliens-- real or imagined. Unless they're demons. No hugs for demons.

If you're into UFOs, that's great. Have fun. If they are real, I hope you are the one who can wave solid evidence in my face and laugh. I'll happily buy you dinner. And you get an extra hug/

Unless you're a demon. No hugs for demons.

You'll be Warm in the Arms of a Mystery Bass Beat

For a couple of years I've been tortured by a song. It's played dozens of times at restaurants; nobody could name tune or band, and the times I tried to use a phone app (Sound Hound) to identify it there was too much background noise. My favorite restaurants are inevitably full of happy people, and get a bit loud.

I love nearly everything about this song, from the apparently simple, driving bass beat to the breathless, non-stop vocal melody. Sometimes I couldn't hear anything but the bass yet I instantly knew the tune and could play all the parts in my head.

With unintelligible lyrics (thanks to ambient noise levels).

Tonight, with my phone about three feet from a speaker, I finally ID'd the song: "The Mayor of Simpleton" by XTC. As soon as I knew the song, lyrics began to resolve in my head. A quick youtube play and they were all back. How weird, to forget an entire song's worth of lyrics.

And I may be the mayor of simpleton
But I know one thing
And that's, "I love you".

Victory is mine. Yes, it's a rather trivial victory, made even more so by needing a smart phone to Name That Song. But I love music, and this song has intruded on well over half our date night meals and meals out with friends the past couple of years. A victory is a victory. I'll take the small ones along with the big ones.

If depth of feeling is a currency,
(please be upstanding for the mayor of simpleton),
Then I'm the man who grew the money tree,
(no chain of office and no hope of getting one).
Some of your friends are too brainy to see,
That they're paupers and that's how they'll stay.

THE MAYOR OF SIMPLETON (intro/verses) by Andy Partridge
Copyright 1989 Virgin Music Ltd.
Bass line as arranged and recorded by Colin Moulding
As reported by Jeff Truzi on http://chalkhills.org/reelbyreal/s_TheMayorOfSimpleton.html

Late night return trip musings

I just dropped Kayla and Lauren off after a late dinner and coffee shop road trip. It's 1:30AM, 70 degrees Fahrenheit, with lots of "Watch for ice on bridge" signs. At this end of Ronald Reagan Parkway there is no light pollution at all. On a long series of gradual hills, my headlights probe the darkness, finding nothing where the road seems to fall off into space. There is nothing obviously to either side, either, only darkness. Black Sabbath's "Into the Void" would be the perfect soundtrack.

I'm hyper-caffeinated and tired, so every second of nothing stretches out into forever. The road goes ever on. I may be home in twenty minutes; I may be tumbling through the void. In the latter case, I'll enjoy it til the caffeine wears off or the air runs out. All of these lead to sleep, which is all I want right this minute.

"Watch for ice on bridge". Maybe the signs have had too much caffeine; they're clearly hallucinating.

Writing 101 - Tools of the Trade

When I started writing, I tended to write. You know, literally. The old-fashioned way, on paper with a pen or pencil. Occasionally with a crayon.

Eventually I transitioned much of that to computers, either locally or on the net as it became available. When I got serious about writing I started carrying a journal or notebook everywhere. Pen and paper again ruled. As I started transcribing some of these stories onto my home desktop computer, I found myself writing there again as well.

I began to notice I tended to write differently based on the tool I was using. This hit me like a newly hatched face hugger from the Alien movies when I wanted to write my novel. The ideas were flowing like a dam had busted, but I couldn't write them down-- not on paper, not on the desktop.

On a whim I decided to try writing on the new Apple Macbook Air they had given me at work (personal use is Allowed). Almost 2,000 words flowed out in a couple of hours. That's a chapter. This happened again the next night. And the next. I wrote over 75,000 words in a month-- all in my spare time amidst a very busy schedule. Nearly all of it was on the laptop. I'd never been able to do that before!

The style was different. Not horribly, but subtly. I think it was perfect for the book. But it wasn't like anything I had written before. Why?

Why, why, why?

A few days after I started pondering this, I was rummaging through art supplies-- crayons, pens, pencils, markers, and brushes. And it hit me. Visual artists use different media for different things. It might vary by mood, or subject, or style, or anything else, but some artists find they can only do certain work, or perhaps their best work, with certain media.

It's true with music, as well. I can pick up my acoustic, my G&L Tribute, my ancient Hagstrom 1, or my Flying V, and likely as not start playing certain styles based on the guitar. Sometimes I even pick the guitar based on what I want to play.

Why should writing be any different? Or any other artistic endeavor?

So, are you an an artist? Try another medium! Swap a paintbrush for a sprayer, a Strat for a Tele, a guitar for a bass, a clarinet for a drum, pencils for markers.

It can help with writer's block (or other artistic equivalents). In fact, that's what happened with the book.

All that said, I'm glad this flowed onto my desktop keyboard. I guess I could have scanned a bunch of PostIt[tm] notes and used the image as the blog, just this once.

Wait. Now I have to try that! Stay tuned.