immerse myself in a stream of inspiring things

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takeru_Kobayashi

It’s a little bit gross but kind of inspiring - a scrawny Japanese guy who, by dint of superior training and discipline, is practically an order of magnitude better than his closest rivals in stuffing inhuman quantities of food down his gullet. This superior performance is made sweeter somehow to me by the fact that many of his competitors are big honking dudes who tower over him, but he eats rings around them with apparent ease. The ease is only apparent though - he trains hard…

It’s another ridiculous underdog story that makes me proud to be part Japanese. :) I love how weird and intense Japanese can be, and often are.

An old favorite from childhood, i was pleasantly surprised to find it available for free in UVA’s internet book project, so re-read it. Absolutely charming and captivating—Grahame’s writing is completely inspiring to me as a would-be spinner of stories for children. He has a sensitive, Romantic view of the countryside and of human nature, but his touch is so light, so deft that you hardly realize that he’s in effect actively campaigning for a certain rustic, nature-oriented way of life.

And his gift for spinning words, my goodness - he just casually tosses out such lines as this one from the seafaring Rat: “those ships run over classic seas, whose every wave throbs with a deathless memory”. Prose-poetry like that litters the landscape of Wind in the Willows, like dandelion seeds cast aloft incidentally by the wind - apparently the natural articulation of Grahame’s Romantic worldview, casting itself into words.

Beautiful, touching, wonderfully well-wrought tale for the young at heart.

Ok, this is a really old video (from 2001) but I just encountered it… This guy is unbelievable. (the second guy in the video… wait for him)

http://www.youtube.com/watch.php?v=mE3tqDLjSLA

This guy redefined for me what the human body can do, in a visceral way that I never got just watching the Olympics on TV, say.

I’ve been bad about updating my 43things entries because I’ve been immersed in launching a beta product http://tracker.jot.com

I am encountering inspiring things each day, I want to be better about recording them.

Here are few—mostly books still for the moment.

Whole New World, Dan Pink
-how right-brain skills are more important than left-brain skills in the coming economy. This is cool because secretly I don’t want to be a full-time programmer, I’d rather do design. I may be fooling myself but I feel like I have latent artistic skill that I never valued enough to develop (or more accurately wasn’t valued by others, in the open marketplace, whereas I wanted to make $$$ ;).

Freakonomics, Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner
—a popular read about hip economics examining crack gang accounting and how Roe vs Wade affected crime, interesting quantitative take on viewing the world

Blink, Malcolm Gladwell
like freakonomics, yeah i finally read this ‘bestseller’, after having heard most of the gist from others : ) How “thin-slicing”—grasping a situation in a second, generally speaking our intuition, is very powerful and should be respected. Really cool description of how the Gottman “love lab” works. Separately we’ve been doing Gottman counseling, so it was eye-opening to really see where the methodology came from. Amazing, the depth and breadth of our (conscious) ignorance about what we are really feeling and doing. Gottman’s team can predict divorce with a 90+% accuracy, based on just 5 minutes of observing apparently-boring discussions between husband and wife. So much half-conscious and unconscious contempt and stonewalling comes to view when trained observers analyze the tapes side-by-side…

a moving and thought-provoking collection of accounts about the struggles of real families who found their own ways of accommodating and even thriving.

Although Bronson is a wee bit “precious” at times, as he is in all his books, the stories are really stirring. Really makes you reconsider your own parents, your own parenting if you have kids, the nature of marriage and family… I had a vague image/ideal of a perfect family and of a perfect marriage, but the book reminded me that it’s foolish to judge myself and others by such a half-assed “standard”.

Some interesting factoids about families/parenting in there too, demonstrating how the idea that modern society is becoming unglued and less-family-oriented than in the past is just a myth.

I had only seen the movie… The book was great too, albeit far more violent—Dorothy’s friends sure do kill a whole lot of creatures, lopping off heads and dashing them to pieces on rocks and so forth, which I don’t remember happening in the film.

Funny, because in the preface, Baum writes about how his book offers only the nice aspects of fantasy, without the grisliness of the older fantasies (like the really ghastly, bloody stuff you’ll find in original Brothers Grimm tales). The purported explanation was that morality doesn’t have to be taught that way anymore (with memorably shocking outcomes for bad behavior), since the teaching of morality been moved into the public schools. Given the violence in the story though I assume this was tongue-in-cheek.

I was moved to read the original “Wizard of Oz” in part by having read “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West” (gregory maguire) not too long ago. It’s an engaging rendition of Oz for adults, dark and intelligent.

There are plenty of hints in the original Oz book leading the way for “Wicked”’s savvy rendition for grown-ups. It’s easy to read lots of political allegory into Oz. It’s no coincidence that Baum himself was a very active Republican, and even wrote a political satire dressed up as a musical. The strange thing about that, however, is that the politics implied by the book would seem to be Populist if anything, which wasn’t quite the Republican platform of the time—William McKinley had reestablished the party as the pro-business party a few years before Oz was published (1900). Teddy Roosevelt, with his trust-busting and Square Deal, would come closer, but that wasn’t till after publication. Hmm.

Anyway, it’s thought-provoking to wander around the original stuff, the roots of the popular imagination, not just experience it third-hand, diluted.

The tone is something like an illustrated primer meant to provide young aliens a sketch of this curious race on Earth that’s busily wiping out itself and everything else.

Some themes: race and racism, class and oppression, materialism and money, inane social mores, mental/spiritual/physical pollution, people living in an entire world made of their own illusions and manipulation, the desperate search for comfort, the alienation, depression, schizophrenia, the general fragility of the mental house of cards, the tragicomedy of sexual behavior, personal and institutional violence, casual destruction, entire lifetimes spent devoid of meaning.

“And so on…”

All told in his familiar voice, staggeringly wry, at once sweeping and utterly trivial, coolly observant, and somehow ultimately compassionate.

It’s openly autobiographical—vonnegut himself is a main character interacting with his own constructs. The novel goes beyond the expected dark humor / satire / social commentary to become vonnegut’s own story at the time of writing, an aging writer struggling to live on amid the madness within and without, disappointed endlessly by humanity’s dark farce, including his own failings.

“Their lives were not worth living, yet they had a strong will to survive…”

My sense is that he has built up an enormous mechanism of olympian pseudo-detachment to blunt his sensitivity to all the suffering and idiocy. Also to perhaps, somehow, with an impressionistic catalogue of the grinding hypocrisy and ugliness and mundanity and numbness and stupefying emptiness and meaninglessness of modern life, sketch out some way forward, toward some fragmentary philosophy that a thinking, feeling person can live by, in what increasingly appears to be an utterly indifferently-made universe littered with self-destructive doing-machines.