I was a little hesitant to post the comic below because I really think we need to all come together as generations and work together to address the common problems we face. I am even suspicious that any fostering of divisiveness is really the work of “The Man” who may be trying to foment generational warfare to divert attention from oligarchy and corporatism. However, when my grandkids were teasing me for being a baby boomer I just had to stand up for my generation! Third agers – I know you would too because we really are the BEST!!!
– in which Dorn continues updating some previous posts.
EGETARIAN’S PROGRESS
In past posts, (Cold turkey, Herbivore log), I promised to report on my experiment to give up all cow meat until Thanksgiving. It’s not quite T-day yet, but I’m pretty confident that the experiment is a success. Even though I REALLY LIKE BEEF, stopping it didn’t produce any irresistible cravings, and I plan to continue excluding it from my diet indefinitely.
I’ve had two lapses. First was when I bought a box of beef broth for a soup I was making. Once I realized that beef broth is made from beef (duh), I still used it and ate the soup anyway.
The second was only today, after the entire draft of this post was written, when I had a pastrami sandwich with dill pickles and saurkraut. I thought pastrami was some pig product and had written a comment in my post about it, but I looked it up just to make sure. Drat! It’s made of beef brisket, so (a) that doubles the number of failures I have to report, and (b) I can’t eat the rest of the pastrami in the fridge!
I also had a near miss: before my video-capsule TV appearance (described here), I had to fast for 36 hours. When I was allowed to eat again after the procedure, I spent much of the long drive home anticipating a stop at the Sonic drive-through, which has GREAT burgers. Fortunately or unfortunately, before I got there I remembered that I had sworn off that sort of thing, and I diverted to a different fast food place to get different junk food.
My “meat tooth” is adequately satisfied by meaty things like portobello mushrooms, and even more so by chicken soup, bacon, eggs, turkey and fish. Recall, I didn’t swear off all meat, just cow. So I’m not really a vegetarian, but what am I, and what is my food regimen called? None of “cow-free”, “nonbeefetarian”, “anti-bovinotroph”, “extra-taurustrial” sound exactly right.
The closest real word I can find is “flexitarian”, meaning a vegetarian who occasionally eats meat. I’m a little put off by the “flexi” part of it, because I used to be a complete omnivore, and now I’ve added some rules and restrictions to my diet, so it seems like I have become more inflexible in my eating. But I suppose the word is just right when applied to a strict vegetarian who has eased off a bit.
“Flexitarian” was selected as the 2003 Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society (https://www.americandialect.org/woty). The word is in impressive company, including 2017 Word of the Year “Fake news” and 2014’s “Black lives matter”. (It seems like life and language have gotten much tougher since 2003, haven’t they?).
These Words of the Year have retained their power, but others haven’t really lived up to their potential. One such is the verb “To be Plutoed”, which means to be demoted or devalued, with a connotation (to me at least, ’cause I like Pluto) that the demotion was ill-considered. It was the Word of the Year in 2006, but never really caught the public’s imagination, despite the fact that Astronomers continue to this day to argue about the wisdom of downgrading Pluto to dwarf planet status.
Googling “plutoed” yields almost no hits after 2007, and virtually none ever with the verb being used in its intended meaning (all are stories about its Word of the Year selection). The fact that language and society have moved on so easily after Pluto’s retirement from the Brotherhood of Planets leaves me inexpressibly sad. Speaking of which…
Things continue satisfactorily. I’m still doing a little bit of consulting work, and I recently signed up with a new government contractor. So far my biggest task there has been to go through orientation.
The orientation presentations—work ethics, sexual harassment, etc.—were pretty much the same as those I saw every year as a Fed, but it was encouraging to see something that I had never seen before in a sexual harassment Powerpoint: that intentionally failing to “pronoun” a coworker correctly can be considered a form of harassment.
I prefer to think that I’m finally seeing this because of a general increase in respect for all individuals’ workplace rights even when they don’t match conventional gender stereotypes, rather than because the orientation came from a private company that’s more woke than the Federal government. And maybe societal norms really are changing for the better: the use of singular “they” as a gender-neutral pronoun was the Word of the Year in 2015.
In general, retirement is still a pretty easy gig. There have been bumps, but mostly not caused by retirement, and in fact often made easier to navigate by being retired. But I can see looming the need to address the Bigger Questions—what am I here for? What should I be doing, in the broadest possible sense? These questions, of course, face us all at all stages of life, but they are good to re-address periodically, especially at times of transition. I’ll keep you posted, perhaps in a future post called something like “Be Who You Are”.
– In which Dorn provides some updates on past posts.
orn’s mysterious illness
The good news about having a fancy city doctor is that they have access to esoteric information and equipment that the country folk might not have. The bad news is that it can take a long time to make use of it.
I had a six-week wait between when my new doctor identified my mystery illness (first described in this post) and when I could take the video capsule endoscopy that would confirm it. But the day finally came.
artist’s conception
They fitted me with a belt containing a receiver and a little TV monitor, and gave me a video camera pill to swallow. It was the size and shape of a large vitamin capsule, or a small Weeble, and one end had a clear dome, inside of which was a flashing strobe light and (I assume) a camera. I swallowed it and we watched it descend my throat on the little monitor. (And “no”, they said, “you can’t watch it progressing through your system all day. The monitor is just for the initial check.”)
Without the Dorn-cam to watch, the rest of the day was pretty dull. I was up near Baltimore, too far to drive home just to turn around and drive back for the procedure closeout. I wasn’t allowed to eat, drink, sleep, sit still, or exercise, so I went to the library for the day. At the end of the day, they took their receiver belt back and sent me home. They didn’t want the camera-pill back, and said I’d know when it was expelled.
When I asked how to be sure the camera was really gone, they said they could order an xray of the area. That certainly didn’t seem very efficient to me. With the wonders of modern digital miniaturization, I figured they could make the capsule start beeping or something after 8 hours (or however long the expected transit time is). Or even better—it could vibrate! Then its presence would be announced more discreetly and more, um, agreeably.
In a couple of days, the doc reported that the pictures had confirmed and located the damage in my intestine. Now I’ve got another procedure scheduled to send another Mars rover up and zap the problem (“zap” is apparently the technical term of art for the procedure). That will happen in another a few weeks. If anything interesting happens then, I’ll let you know.
Rapper name
(Update of this post.) The same day as my internal video debut, in the parking garage by the library, I saw painted on one of the walls the logo of the 2015 Superbowl. It looked like an ad, but what it was doing on a concrete interior wall in Towson I have no idea, especially considering neither Baltimore nor any other local team was playing (it was, I think, the Seahawks v the Patriots). But what most caught my eye was the Roman designation for the 49th Superbowl: XLIX.
Now there’s a rapper name for you: X-LIX! It sounds kind of naughty, vaguely demonic even, and it rolls off the tongue easily. And it sounds familiar, like a real word, even though it isn’t.
The sound of the name reminded me of Bela Oxmyx (“OX-mix”), a space alien/south Chicago gangster who appeared in a 1968 episode of the original Star Trek series called “A Piece of the Action”. What a great episode, in which Mr Spock speaks that memorable line, “I’d advise youse to keep dialing, Oxmyx!”.
What a great show, in fact! I remember wanting to quit my Boy Scout troop because they insisted on meeting on Thursday evenings, when Star Trek came on. And in those days, children, if you didn’t see a TV show at the one time it was broadcast, you didn’t see it at all until six months later during summer reruns (which were also aired on Thursday evenings)! And there was no Youtube or social media to read about it, you just had to admit to your friends in school next day that you missed it, ask them what happened, and let them gloat. The kids these days, they don’t know how easy they’ve got it!
But oh, the horror! It’s occurred to me the real reason why the rapper name X-LIX sounds so familiar to me! It’s not Oxmyx at all, it’s that it is only one letter away from that constipation medicine Ex-Lax! Oh cruel fate! That’s the stereotypical old man medicine, and a death sentence for a hipster rapper wannabe! My rapper routine might as well consist of shuffling across the stage muttering about you young hooligans! while wearing my fuzzy slippers and a bathrobe over an “I’m for Joe” t-shirt. Oh well, can’t have that. The name search continues.
Side note: I’m noticing that the fraction of my posts that deal with my GI tract is disconcertingly high. If I had known things would trend this way, I might have thought twice about starting to blog at all (or about getting old). Still, “write what you know”, as they say.
Continued in part 2, with updates on my semi-vegetarian conversion and other news.
– In which Dorn turns breaking things into a virtue.
One of my duties at my last job was to break things. When a new computer program, website, or procedure was created by the office, I would dive into it and test it to the breaking point if I could. I followed the instructions as laid out, but tried think of ways they could be misinterpreted or mis-applied, resulting in the failure of the whole system. The theory was, of course, that it was better to find and fix these weak points while the product was in house than after it was made public.
I liked my job of breaking things, partly because it was like puzzle-solving, and partly because I had a knack for it. I understood the feelings of Nick Naylor, the “hero” of the 2005 dark comedy Thank You For Smoking. He’s a lobbyist for Big Tobacco, and when asked by a lung cancer victim how he can work at such a job and even enjoy it, he says the job gives him satisfaction because he is so good at it. (This is a very funny movie, and I recommend it if you missed it the first time around, unless you are offended by slurs cast on the health virtues of Vermont cheddar cheese. It’ll be on HBO over the next week or two.)
Of course I’m not suggesting that there’s any moral equivalency between trying to break things that people have worked to make unbreakable, and trying to get people addicted to a nasty life-shortening habit for money. The latter is odious, while the former is perfectly respectable. As Phil Johnson points out in his essay “Failure is just data“, testing out a new product is like a scientist testing a scientific hypothesis. If the product fails to perform as expected, it just means that the hypothesis (that the product is ready for rollout) is disproved.
“If this were to happen to a scientist,” Johnson explains,”the reaction would be that they are doing their job well, as long as they capture the data about why the hypothesis was wrong. It’s not out of the ordinary, it’s expected and necessary. The key is framing a failure as an informative versus negative outcome.” (Johnson may have a few blind spots himself about the mental and emotional makeup of scientists.)
His point is that there’s an emotional bias against experiencing a failure which is frequently misplaced—it often should be welcomed as a stepping stone towards ultimate success. This emotional bias is a form of confirmation bias (my favorite bias), which causes us to seek out information that confirms what we already believe, or what we want to believe.
This bias is present even when we don’t have pride of ownership in a product we are testing, or any objective stake at all in the success or failure of the process. In his book The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt describes an experiment performed by the originator of the term “confirmation bias”, where the process for determining a simple sequence of numbers is investigated:
In 1960, Peter Wason published his report on the “2–4–6 problem.” He showed people a series of three numbers and told them that the triplet conforms to a rule. They had to guess the rule by generating other triplets and then asking the experimenter whether the new triplet conformed to the rule. Suppose a subject first sees 2–4–6. The subject then generates a triplet in response: “4–6–8?” “Yes,” says the experimenter. “How about 120–122–124?” “Yes.”
It seemed obvious to most people that the rule was consecutive even numbers. But the experimenter told them this was wrong, so they tested out other rules: “3–5–7?” “Yes.” “What about 35–37–39?” “Yes.” “OK, so the rule must be any series of numbers that rises by two?” “No.” People had little trouble generating new hypotheses about the rule, sometimes quite complex ones. But what they hardly ever did was to test their hypotheses by offering triplets that did not conform to their hypothesis. For example, proposing 2–4–5 (yes) and 2–4–3 (no) would have helped people zero in on the actual rule: any series of ascending numbers.
Wason called this phenomenon the confirmation bias, the tendency to seek out and interpret new evidence in ways that confirm what you already think. People are quite good at challenging statements made by other people, but if it’s your belief, then it’s your possession—your child, almost—and you want to protect it, not challenge it and risk losing it.
My knack for breaking products and processes at work might have been related to my ability to suspend any pride of ownership (which of course is easier if it’s not my own product that I’m testing).
Now that I’m retired, though, I find I don’t have as many chances to practice this skill—there just aren’t that many things around that need me to test them to the breaking point, unless I want to failure-test my own work (which I’m not confident I could do objectively), or to tell Kathleen all the ways that the thing she is doing isn’t working. And that way madness lies!
Kathleen and I went to the movies today to see the NY Metropolitan Opera’s live simulcast of Massenet’s Manon, and it was so good I felt it deserved a post, or at least a mini-post. We have been seeing Met Opera simulcasts at the local movie theater for a couple of years now, and I think this might have been the best performance I’ve seen yet, which is saying a lot. The music was superbly sung by the romantic leads Lisette Oropesa and Michael Fabiano, who were both at the top of their form. They were outstandingly well matched both musically and dramatically, and had a definite charged chemistry on stage. If I had taken a trip to New York and sprung for full-price live opera tickets, I would not have been disappointed.
I especially wanted to rave about it because the simulcast is being repeated at many theaters next Wednesday, October 30, and if you have been thinking about seeing one of those Met Operas at the movies, I recommend this one to you. More info about next week’s event is here.
Here’s a few necessary disclaimers, though: (1) It is full-blooded opera, and not one of those operas where you can sing along “Hiya Tora!”, or sit back and enjoy the scenery if you don’t like the music. So if you don’t like opera, this is probably not for you. (2) Like most operas, it ends tragically. (3) It’s a big investment—we spent over $20 a ticket, and 4-1/2 hours in the theater (although I felt the time flew by). If that all sounds like too much for a Wednesday afternoon or evening, keep an eye out for it and it might show up one day on PBS Great Performances. But if you think you’d enjoy seeing and hearing it at the movies, then I’m betting you will and I urge you to go!
