SkyFey | The Blog

I’m not given to writing “fan” letters, but today I was impelled to send this email to Charles Pierce, the Boston Globe staff writer whose one-paragraph satirical column, “Pierced,” appears every week in The Boston Globe Magazine:

Dear Mr. Pierce:
Your writing is always incisive, but today you were downright surgical - and when I read “…watching [Boston Mayor Tom Menino] deliver a speech is the closest thing we’ll ever get to a one-man pie fight,” I almost fell off my chair. (Granted, I have MS so staying ON a chair is often harder than falling OFF one, but still…)

“Pierced” is frequently my favorite piece in The Boston Globe Magazine, but this one was surpassingly good. And memorable: “One-man pie fight” is a descriptor that will assuredly accompany Menino’s name in story after story, right up to (and probably including) the poor mayor’s eventual obit.

Thank you!

(See “One-Man Show” for the rest of this great column.)

Yeah, so presidential hopeful John McCain chose Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential nominee. And this surprises you why?

He had no choice but to add a woman to his ticket. After the Democratic convention, Republicans were forced to recognize that the handwriting was on the wall: Voters are more than ready to listen to a younger, fresher voice. In addition, McCain and his cronies believe that there may be some former Hillary supporters who are on the fence about voting for a black man. Thus, they had to bring someone aboard who is both younger and female if they are to have any hope of garnering any presumptive swing votes.

Fortunately for the rest of us, however, this is a huge strategic mistake. Virtually every negative assertion that McCain’s camp has made about Barack Obama has been countered, both easily and effectively; the sole remaining claim that some found difficult to answer was the younger man’s age and relative inexperience. But now the Republican ticket’s own vice-presidential nominee is a former beauty queen — a self-styled “hockey mom” who (a) is three years younger than Sen. Obama; (b) has only been a governor (of an under-populated state, at that) for two years; and (c) prior to that was a small-town mayor!

McCain turned 72 years of age on the day he publicly named his running mate; if elected, he would be the oldest man ever elected to a first term as POTUS. He also has a history of cancer. Did he and his team choose to ignore the fact that, in McCain’s own words, the vice president must be qualified to step immediately into the presidency of the world’s greatest superpower?

I really believe McCain’s selection was a fatal error, and I love it.

(…and the perfect editorial cartoon lives here: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/cartoons/08_25_08_inktank/.)

This is not your grandfather’s USA. After too many years of Republicanism, our nation is now scorned worldwide. We are effectively bankrupt, and we are saddling our children with debt in the trillions of dollars. We are “leading the world” only in the pace at which we’re destroying the planet. And the list goes on…

When people have complained to me that “Barack Obama is inspirational, but the job requires more than just hopeful talk,” I have insisted right along that what this country needs more than anything right now is precisely that: INSPIRATION. We are in such deep trouble that all the planning in the world will be useless without a real leader to inspire in us the will and the strength to do the hard work of recovery. And Sen. Obama’s acceptance speech last Thursday night struck a surpassingly perfect chord of both concrete plans and inspiration; it was both historic and transcendent.

I hope and pray that we will soon be able to call him President Obama.

A person who has had a stroke may experience dramatic (sometimes very negative) changes in his or her personality, but we don’t call those changes “mental” illness. Why, then, are depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, et al called “mental” illnesses?

The very decision to linguistically categorize these conditions as “mental” infers that they are “in or of the mind,” or perhaps even “imaginary.” This usage can suggest that behaviors which develop from (or are exaggerated by) these disorders are caused by controllable errors in an individual’s thinking. That has led to a widespread sociocultural belief that “mental” illness is just symptomatic of a character defect or lack of restraint, and this has stigmatized terribly the individuals who suffer from any form of psychiatric illness.

(This was especially true in earlier generations. For example, my older daughter struggled most of her life with severe and frequently acute bipolar disorder, but my late father — an otherwise well-educated and cultured man who was the chief executive of a multi-national company — felt strongly that her problems were caused by insufficient discipline in my household. Unfortunately, that utterly wrong-headed notion is still seen today even among some younger people.)

I think I have a better idea . . . Read more »

I’m attempting to put myself in a bottle that will one day wash up on the beach for my children.”

That’s how Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor Randy Pausch described the now-famous “Last Lecture” he delivered at the university in the fall of 2007 — when he already knew that he had only months left to live. In that legacy, “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” his children (Dylan, Logan, and Chloe) will have something to cherish that few others ever will — or could — imagine. What Pausch couldn’t know at the time was that his lecture would also become a priceless legacy to millions of others around the world.

Pausch was a notable figure even before his lecture went viral on YouTube. He was one of the youngest individuals to earn tenure in his field. A widely respected teacher of video-game and virtual-reality technology, he led the development of Cargnegie Mellon’s “Alice,” a revolutionary, freely downloadable 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create animations for telling stories, playing interactive games, or making videos to share on the web. He was a key member of the university’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute and co-founded its Entertainment Technology Center, a master’s degree program that trains artists, actors, engineers, and computer scientists on collaboration.

“The Last Lecture” (Hyperion, April 2008) also became an international bestselling book that has been translated into 30 languages.

In tribute to the remarkable life Pausch lived, the Wall Street Journal’s Brightcove.com channel offers several videos about the professor. (Yes, Brightcove’s streaming-video commercials before every video are annoying. But they’re short, and I suspect that the pragmatic professor would say, “Get over it. They’re worth watching.”) CMU has posted a detailed memorial page.

Among the many pithy comments that Pausch’s lecture has made famous, one of my favorites is, “Brick walls are there to separate us from the people who don’t really want to achieve their childhood dreams.” He also said that “if you lead your life the right way, the Karma will take care of itself. Your dreams will come to you.” In his concluding remarks, he stated that his lecture was not really about how to achieve your dreams, but how to live your life.

Pausch, 47, died at his home in Chesapeake, Virginia early on the morning of Friday, July 25, leaving his wife, Jai, and their three children. Donations can be made to Carnegie Mellon’s Randy Pausch Memorial Fund.

“Blogging on blogging.” Hmph. It doesn’t get much more self-referential than that, does it?! (But is it really self-referential? Or does it just mean I’m thinking in circles? You be the judge…)

A post titled “Blogging is better than photography,” published by my good friend Steve Yost in his blog, Blur Circle, set me to thinking. Way back in 2002, when the blogosphere was still in its infancy, Steve suggested, in effect, that blogging may help one view and even experience the world more consciously. I agree, but… Read more »

Do you ever find yourself suddenly “knowing” the answer to something so deeply, so incontrovertibly, that you have to work the new “knowledge” backward just to figure out how you might have arrived there? Not long ago, while I was watching a piece on one of the morning TV shows about the massive die-offs of bats in the northeast, I abruptly “knew” — in what may seem to onlookers to be an unjustifiably absolute manner — what is causing the die-offs. At the same time, I also “knew” what is causing the mysterious disappearance in the same area of vast numbers of honeybees.

Cell towers. Read more »

Ahhh, pet peeves. Who among us doesn’t have a few? (And, given sufficient neuroses, some of us may have more than others!)

This particular one is really a mini-Peeve of sorts. Language being one of the things that has long been of great interest to me, I have found myself wondering why the headgear one attaches to a stereo is called “headphones” while a similar item one attaches to a telephone is called a “headset.” Shouldn’t it be the other way ’round? Read more »

Booker T. Washington once said, “Few things help individuals more than to place responsibility upon them, and to let them know that you trust them.” I hadn’t read that until very recently, but it’s actually how I managed people ranging from my employees to my own children.

It’s long been a credo of mine that people will always live up — or DOWN — to your expectations of them. That is, if you expect or assume laziness, or deceit, or incapability, or any other lesser qualities, then nine times out of ten that is exactly what you will get. On the other hand, if you expect or assume anything from “simple” trustworthiness and hard work to integrity and competence, that’s what you will get, too.

And sometimes, given that sort of environment, actual greatness can appear.

Todd Small was stuck in quicksand again. It happened, as always, on the floor of the Seattle machine shop where he worked. His shift complete, Small was making the 150-yard walk from his workstation to his car, when he realized that his left leg was sinking deep in the stuff. Though this had happened before — it happened nearly every day now — he stopped and glanced down at his feet. His Nikes looked normal, still firmly planted on the shop’s concrete floor. But he was stuck, just the same. His brain was sending an electrical pulse saying “walk,” but as the signal streaked from his cerebellum and down his spinal cord, it snagged on scar tissue where the myelin layer insulating his nerve fibers had broken down. The message wasn’t getting to his hip flexors or his hamstrings or his left foot. That connection had been severed by his multiple sclerosis. And once again, Small was left with the feeling that, as he described it, “I’m up to my waist in quicksand.” For the 400,000 Americans with multiple sclerosis, Todd Small’s description will most likely ring true.

The rest of that New York Times article is worth reading, but the most salient feature is its pointer to a remarkable new resource: PatientsLikeMe.com, a Web site whose stated goal is “to enable people to share information that can improve the lives of patients diagnosed with life-changing diseases” — specifically, for people who have MS, Parkinson’s Disease, AIDS, ALS, or certain mental-health disorders.

The founders say they have created a community of patients, doctors, and organizations that “inspires, informs, and empowers individuals,” and that they are “committed to providing patients with access to the tools, information, and experiences that they need to take control of their disease.”

It’s worth a visit.