“As Dunning read through the article, a thought washed over him, an epiphany. If Wheeler was too stupid to be a bank robber, perhaps he was also too stupid to know that he was too stupid to be a bank robber — that is, his stupidity protected him from an awareness of his own stupidity.”
From Errol Morris in a simply fascinating essay, The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is (Part 1).
“[I]f you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent.”
One of the best gifts I’ve ever received was a losing lottery ticket. My brother bought it for me. I realize that doesn’t sound like a great gift, since it only cost a dollar, and it lost. But the way he did it was pure evil genius.
No one wants to buy a winning lottery ticket for someone else. You’d bang your head on the wall for the rest of your life, yelling “WHY OH WHY DIDN’T I KEEP THAT ONE??? WHAAAWHAAAAWHAAAA!!!” That’s bad for the wall.
My brother solved that problem by buying for himself two additional lottery tickets with the same numbers as the one he got for me. He explained that in case my ticket won, he wanted to be twice as rich. It’s the thought that counts.
The Dilbert Blog
Scott Adams goes on to explain that he’s told this story “about a hundred times, always to good effect.” So, it’s a gift that keeps on giving.
First posted here four years ago today.
Roger Ebert begins another wonderful if somewhat meandering blog post:
The French word frisson describes something English has no better word for: a brief intense reaction, usually a feeling of excitement, recognition, or terror. It’s often accompanied by a physical shudder, but not so much when you’re web surfing.
You know how it happens. You’re clicking here or clicking there, and suddenly you have the OMG moment. In recent days, for example, I felt frissons when learning that Gary Coleman had died, that most of the spilled oil was underwater, that Joe McGinness had moved in next to the Palins, that a group of priests’ mistresses had started their own Facebook group, and that Bill Nye the Science Guy says “to prevent Computer Vision Syndrome, every 20 minutes, spend 20 seconds looking 20 feet away.”
Since the 50’s, a lot has changed in way of women’s rights and their duties in and out of the house. I highly doubt any company could get away with phrases like “The Chef [mixer] does everything but cook – that’s what wives are for!” nowadays. Or how about an ad agency pitching a company an idea of a wife bent over her husband’s knee as he prepares to spank her.
A fascinating piece on Loneliness and the Culture of ‘No’. Highly recommended.
In a way, Steuver says, they’re not dissimilar from the folks who camp out in front of Best Buy on Black Friday, shoppers who say they’re there for Christmas bargains but likely are on scene simply to be part of a happening event – feeling a need to connect with fellow Americans in ways our culture discourages because of technology and the fragmentation of media.
First posted here six years ago today.
Wow!
From Reuters via CNN —
A pregnant woman in Mexico gave birth to a healthy baby boy after performing a caesarean section on herself with a kitchen knife, doctors said on Tuesday.
It is thought to be the first known case of a self-inflicted caesarean in which both the mother and baby survived.
The unidentified 40-year-old, who lived in a rural area without electricity, running water or sanitation that was an eight-hour drive from the nearest hospital, performed the operation when she could not deliver the baby naturally.
First posted two years ago today.
Mine Is Longer than Yours
In this week’s The New Yorker, Michael Kinsley has about as accurate an analysis of aging as any I’ve read. Worthwhile for oldsters of all ages. He also touches poignantly on his Parkinson’s.
Some excerpts:
What’s more, of all the gifts that life and luck can bestow—money, good looks, love, power—longevity is the one that people seem least reluctant to brag about. In fact, they routinely claim it as some sort of virtue—as if living to ninety were primarily the result of hard work or prayer, rather than good genes and never getting run over by a truck. Maybe the possibility that the truck is on your agenda for later this morning makes the bragging acceptable. The longevity game is one that really isn’t over till it’s over.
Anyway, the answer is sixty-three. If a hundred Americans start the voyage of life together, on average one of them will have died by the time the group turns sixteen. At forty, their lives are half over: further life expectancy at age forty is 39.9. And at age sixty-three the group starts losing an average of one person every year. Then it accelerates. By age seventy-five, sixty-seven of the original hundred are left. By age one hundred, three remain.
For a yuppie careerist, the first painful recognition that you have crossed the invisible line probably comes at work. You’ve done fine, but guess what? You will not be chairman of the company, or editor of the newspaper, or president of the university. It’s mathematically inevitable that for every C.E.O. there will be half a dozen vice-presidents whose careers will seem successful enough to everybody but themselves. Nevertheless, to them this realization is poignant.
Precisely.
First posted here three years ago today.
You can fool some of the people all of the time
In 1938, wallet manufacturer the E. H. Ferree company in Lockport, New York decided to promote its product by showing how a Social Security card would fit into its wallets. A sample card, used for display purposes, was inserted in each wallet. Company Vice President and Treasurer Douglas Patterson thought it would be a clever idea to use the actual SSN of his secretary, Mrs. Hilda Schrader Whitcher.The wallet was sold by Woolworth stores and other department stores all over the country. Even though the card was only half the size of a real card, was printed all in red, and had the word “specimen” written across the face, many purchasers of the wallet adopted the SSN as their own. In the peak year of 1943, 5,755 people were using Hilda’s number. SSA acted to eliminate the problem by voiding the number and publicizing that it was incorrect to use it. (Mrs. Whitcher was given a new number.) However, the number continued to be used for many years. In all, over 40,000 people reported this as their SSN. As late as 1977, 12 people were found to still be using the SSN “issued by Woolworth.”
Interesting Facts About Social Security Numbers at Money, Matter, and More Musings
The 40,000 are the same sort of people that some politicians would have manage their own social security investments.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmcxIokfOiE
Not a bad song, done by actual GEICO associates including one very famous and very wealthy GEICO associate as the tattooed rock star.
These musicals are an annual thing for GEICO. The Consumerist has the previous two. Warren Buffett appeared in them too.
At The Book Bench at The New Yorker Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn lists some of her favorite awesome moments from The Book of Awesome:
-When cashiers open up new checkout lanes at the grocery store.
-Hitting a bunch of green lights in a row.
-Bakery air.
-Waking up before your alarm clock and realizing you’ve got lots of sleep time left.
-The smell of crayons.
-Finally remembering a word that’s been on the tip of your tongue for so long.
-Putting potato chips on a sandwich.
-When you nudge the person snoring next to you and it makes them stop.
-The shampoo head massage you sometimes get at the hairdresser.
-Moving up a shoe size when you’re a kid.
-The smell of books.
What would you add?
A fascinating profile of a remarkable woman. Be sure to watch the videos.
SinPantalones had this on Twitter. Thanks. Great stuff.
“I don’t think it matters how long you live, as long as you can say that I’ve gotten everything out of life.”
I’m watching a movie late last night, stretched out on the bed. I keep a Pendleton Indian blanket on the bed, usually folded over the footboard, mostly as decor. But sometimes — like when I’m watching a movie — I’ll pull it around me to keep warm. Last night was one of those times.
The movie was Skins, set on the modern Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. A character dies and there is a scene at his service, with the actor laid out in the coffin — wrapped in a Pendleton Indian blanket.
Same blanket.
Brrr.
Dave Barry posted this story on his blog in 2005. It’s a good — and all too typical — one.
So I took my daughter to soccer practice this evening, and another dad and I were talking to one of the moms, whom we both know and whom we have both seen roughly once a week for the past six months. After we talked for about 10 minutes, a second mom showed up, and immediately said to the mom we’d been talking to: “YOU HAD YOUR BABY!” And then they hugged, and the new mom got out baby pictures. And the other dad and I looked at each other and realized that not only had we failed to notice that she’d had a baby, but we had been at most only dimly aware that she had been pregnant. We apologized, and she assured us that it was no big deal. Women are accustomed to the cluelessness of guys in these matters.
The thing is, if she had shown up carrying a cool new cell phone, we would have noticed that.
As Nancy Astor said, when she admitted that she married beneath her, but then, ‘all women do.'”
Let’s hope Sarah Killen continues to be special. So far, she’s golden.
This essay by Mary T. Kelly at Salon is ostensibly a critique of NBC’s new show, “The Marriage Ref” (which I must admit, I watched).
But Kelly’s essay is more and I recommend it to anyone interested in relationships. An excerpt:
When it gets right down to it, human beings just aren’t as complicated as we like to make ourselves out to be.
We want to be seen… seen for who we are, darker sides and all. We want to be felt in that way that someone is so connected to us that when we feel pain, they feel it for us, too. They can empathize, and we find relief in knowing that we have an ally. We want to be touched, we crave to be touched, whether it’s in the full blown passions of wild and unrestrained sex or the gentle holding of the hand while watching a movie in a dark theater.
. . .But we are a stubborn group of people, and it is often easier to focus on the silly, the superficial and the insistence that we are right.
What is this “Tattoo-to-tooth ratio,” you ask? Simply put, the ratio can be calculated by dividing the number of tattoos present on the patient by the number of teeth remaining in the patients skull. For example, a patient with 24 tattoos and 2 teeth would be said to have the astonishing ratio of 12. A general rule of thumb is that if the tattoo-to-tooth ratio is greater than or equal to one, your patient is indestructible. The higher the TTR score, the lower the likelihood of a terminal outcome. A patient with a TTR of just two could be run over by a truck after being shot twice in the back outside of the bar in which they drank six fifths of whiskey, and shortly after admission to the emergency department they would be demanding cigarettes and sexual favors from any nearby persons.
There’s more. Thanks to SinPantalones for the tweet.
First posted here four years ago today.
Malcolm Gladwell from an exchange with ESPN’s Bill Simmons:
As for your (very kind) question about my writing, I’m not sure I can answer that either, except to say that I really love writing, in a totally uncomplicated way. When I was in high school, I ran track and in the beginning I thought of training as a kind of necessary evil on the way to racing. But then, the more I ran, the more I realized that what I loved was running, and it didn’t much matter to me whether it came in the training form or the racing form. I feel the same way about writing. I’m happy writing anywhere and under any circumstances and in fact I’m now to the point where I’m suspicious of people who don’t love what they do in the same way. I was watching golf, before Christmas, and the announcer said of Phil Mickelson that the tournament was the first time he’d picked up a golf club in five weeks. Assuming that’s true, isn’t that profoundly weird? How can you be one of the top two or three golfers of your generation and go five weeks without doing the thing you love? Did Mickelson also not have sex with his wife for five weeks? Did he give up chocolate for five weeks? Is this some weird golfer’s version of Lent that I’m unaware of? They say that Wayne Gretzky, as a 2-year-old, would cry when the Saturday night hockey game on TV was over, because it seemed to him at that age unbearably sad that something he loved so much had to come to end, and I’ve always thought that was the simplest explanation for why Gretzky was Gretzky. And surely it’s the explanation as well for why Mickelson will never be Tiger Woods.
I’ll quit writing about this now, but I finished James Bradley’s Flags of Our Fathers this morning around 1. The last quarter of the book deals with the bond tour that followed in 1945 for the three flag-raising survivors and their life after the war.
It’s a very, very good book.
I was left as I turned out the light with this haunting line from another Iwo Jima medic who also served in Korea and Vietnam:
“The dreams have lasted for years. At seventy-three I still get ’em. I’ve been in three wars and I haven’t got past Iwo yet.”
My long-time friend Jeanne volunteers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. She sent this along yesterday:
Last summer I saw The Hurt Locker with a friend of mine. About a month ago there was a GI at Walter Reed who did exactly that in Afghanistan. The crew is called something like battle (or battlefield) engineers. They ride over a route a convoy is going to take to clear the IEDs. The vehicles are made in South Africa especially to withstand the shock of explosions and cost a quarter of a million per vehicle. He told me much of the necessary functional stuff is on the outside so they can pull off damaged parts and replace them quickly.
I asked if he’d seen the movie and he had. I said I know movies have to telescope events and asked him if any aspect of the movie was realistic. He got all hung up on the details, i.e. no team would go into a building or site alone like they did in the movie. The sense of the adrenalin rush, however, was real, he admitted. He loved his job.
He broke his back and both legs in an explosion. He said it was because the back seats are bolted in place–different from the front seats to save room. This causes beaucoup broken backs when there’s an explosion. He told his Senator that the vehicles should be modified to lessen injuries.
He has all his limbs and will recover. He can’t go back to his old job, however, because his injuries will leave him below standard for strength. He’s getting out of the Army because there’s no other job that appeals to him.
At Dinner without Crayons Tanya has another wonderful story.
For old time’s sake, the first post ever here from Overheard in New York (four years ago today):
Girl #1: I just don’t think I’m his type. He’s very intellectual.
Girl #2: What do you mean?
Girl #1: He’s all “yada yada yada” and I’m very “What’s your favorite Starburst?”
There are few ways better to spend 21 minutes on the internet than this.
J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement (2008) from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.
Herbert and Zelmyra Fisher were married in 1924. That’s 86 years.
The questions are insipid for the most part and the answers unsurprising, but what the heck, it’s Saint Valentine’s Day.
1. HER DIARY
Tonight I thought he was acting weird.
We had made plans to meet at a bar to have a drink. I was shopping with my friends all day long, so I thought he was upset at the fact that I was a bit late, but he made no comment. Conversation wasn’t flowing so I suggested that we go somewhere quiet so we could talk. He agreed but he kept quiet and absent. I asked him what was wrong; he said nothing. I asked him if it was my fault that he was upset. He said it had nothing to do with me and not to worry.
On the way home I told him that I loved him, he simply smiled and kept driving. I can’t explain his behavior. I don’t know why he didn’t say I love you too. When we got home I felt as if I had lost him, as if he wanted nothing to do with me anymore. He just sat there and watched T.V. He seemed distant and absent.
Finally, I decided to go to bed. About 10 minutes later he came to bed, and to my surprise he responded to my caress and we made love, but I still felt that he was distracted and his thoughts were somewhere else.
He fell asleep – I cried. I don’t know what to do. I’m almost sure that his thoughts are with someone else. My life is a disaster.
2. HIS DIARY
I shot the worst round of golf in my life today, but at least I got laid.
Found at Andrew Tobias – Money and Other Subjects in 2006.