Brainwashing

It has suddenly become clear to me why parents are so concerned about their children being "brainwashed" by Obama. Since they are so easily convinced of such unsupported lies as 1) Obama is not an American; 2) Obama will be setting up death squads to eliminate the weak and elderly and 3) Obama wants to take over your medical decisions - and so on and so on. Clearly, since it is so easy to brainwash these folks with lies, they have a deep seated fear that their children will be brainwashed by facts and sensible values - creating between them and their children an insurmountable "generational" gap.

Another stupid health warning

Oh for heaven's sake! Our reusable shopping bags may harbor bacteria. Wow! What a surprise! Everything in the world may harbor bacteria, and we apparently should be concerned about our reusable shopping bags. I scanned the article to learn that, should you allow your food to rot and develop mold or allow unwrapped or sloppily wrapped raw meat sit in your shopping bag, it may leave bacteria which might be harmful. Well, as the kids say, "Duh." Did any of you out there not know that letting mold grow or perishable food rot in your shopping bag could result in harmful bacteria. At the very least we must realize that it would be "icky". And stink! Shouldn't that be enough to tell us to wash it or throw it away? Surely, this is not a necessary warning about using reusable shopping bags.

Rethinking gray

Silver threads among the gold. Ok, so maybe I am getting a little gray. I noticed this morning that my silver hair can be very shiny and even kind of pretty. Also noticed in a Star Tribune ad featuring a number of recent high school graduates that all of the girls, who were uniformly beautiful, had long, flowing hair. Good thing I'm waaaay past high school graduation age. I never, ever looked good in long hair. I was never beautiful either, at least not in a traditional way.

Daydreaming

The Week, May 29, 2009, Health & Science section: "Daydreaming is good for you" Although "often viewed as a sign of laziness . . . [during daydreaming] there's a lot of activity in regions of gray matter dedicated to high-level thought and complex problem-solving." The article goes on to note that the average person "spends as much as a third of his or her waking hours in reverie."

Wow! Who would have thought it? But, wait a minute. What exactly is daydreaming? I'd define it as letting my thoughts drift off to a quiet ocean beach, or lake shore where I observe cloud patterns and watch the hawk making lazy circles in the sky. But if we spend as much as a third of our waking hours in reverie, then the definition of daydreaming must be much broader than that. I'm wondering if the hours I spend doing jigsaw puzzles and playing Scrabble are in fact productive hours. Wouldn't that be great?

How exciting to know that I'm using gray matter dedicated to high-level thought and complex problem-solving. Shoot, I don't think I've engaged in high-level thought for years. My thoughts, quite frankly, are trivia, and not even productive trivia. I couldn't compete in the game of Trivial Pursuit, nor do I ever have even a faint idea the answers to the baseball trivia questions that tease Bert's and Dick's minds during the Twins baseball broadcasts. No, my trivial thoughts pursue recollections of insignificant, useless events of the past connected with my daily habits and places. Of course, nothing is more trivial than that, nor more boring.

The researcher summarizes or surmises that, when you're not paying attention, for example, to the sermon in church, "your mind may be taking that time to address more important questions in your life, such as advancing your career or personal relationships." What are the theological implications of that?

But what if they're right? Maybe my boring trivial thought pursuits are more than they seem. I'll try to give that some thought, just as soon as I finish this jigsaw puzzle that I'm so close to solving. It's a picture of a sandy beach on the shore of a beautiful ocean. Really!

Weblog shortened is Blog

Digital life, Star Tribune May 20, 2009. Headline: "Re-rip music so songs will play on the chopper." Not long ago that headline would have made even less sense than it does now. "When you ripped songs from CDs, the default Windows Media Player setting probably was to copy them as WMA files. You can fix that by re-ripping your CDs as MP3 files." What surprises me most is that, nonsensical as it sounds or would have sounded to me a few years ago, I in fact get the essence of its meaning and envision clicking things on the computer to make music "download" onto some gizmo or other in a different format.

A friend, who claims she will not read blogs and wants nothing to do with them, does not even want to hear the word. She claims the world is divided into mammals and dinosaurs, and she is a dinosaur, minus the large teeth and weird body shape, of course.

A few years ago - or maybe it was just a few months ago - I wanted nothing to do with blogs either, but here I am. I used to dismiss them, although I read a few and was entertained. I feared I could not be clever like the others and scoffed at the idea of being a blogger. Yet, I like to write, so now a "blogger is I". Still up to taking risks, I guess.

Now there's Twitter, which I understand is a short form of messaging that many do from their telephones. I have insisted that I will not do texting and will not get into this twitter thing, but you never know.

I've learned that I can't upgrade my phone to a Blackberry device until September. Okay, so I did ask about it. Do you suppose in September I'll tiptoe another step into the 21st century? At my age perhaps I should do as much of this stuff as I can understand for as long as I can understand it. One of these days I may find that I too am a dinosaur, and when someone talks of re-ripping music, I'll envision a choir anthem being torn into bits of paper. I may then suggest anthems to rip based on the dullness of their alto line. That ripping effort could take years to complete.