Who was Elvis, Mom, and why would aliens take him?

 When my daughter Sheila learned to read, I was thrilled. Each successful passing of a milestone in her reading career made me giddy. From simple word books she graduated to books with more pages and more words on the pages. Her rhythmic reading of Dr. Seuss made my heart swell with joy. She started going through books faster than televangelists go through cliches. 

When she began working her way through her first chapter book, my eyes misted over. When she showed interest in things like Ramona the Brave and Ellen Tebbits - books I had loved - I decided the passing down of favorite books from one generation to another is one of the most delightful experiences humans can have. 

Then one morning she said, "Mom? That doesn't say healthy adult breakfast, it says Junior Mints." Out of nowhere it hit me it can be a pain when kids can read.

She started paying attention to street signs, too, things like "No Parking Anytime," "Speed Limit 55," and "Don't Walk." Education had turned her into a 50-pound backseat driver.

Frustrating, yes, but nothing compared to the horror of what it's like navigating grocery store check-out lanes packed with magazines blaring deliberating shocking headlines in bright colors and there you are with a curious child looking to expand her vocabulary.

"Mom?"

"Yes?"

"What's this last word here? Woman gives birth to an...orange?"

"Orangutan. Don't pay any attention to it. They're lying. Could you hand me the apples?"

"How about this one. Twenty - let me spell the next word - t, e, c, h, n, i, q, u, e, s."

"Techniques. It means ways of doing stuff."

"Okay, then this one says: Twenty Techniques to Keep Him Coming Back for More." 

"God help me. The apples, please? And isn't there a Reader's Digest over there somewhere?"

"Keep who coming back for more what?"

"You know what an aspirin bottle looks like, right?"

"Right."

"Go to aisle 9 and get me the big one. Take your time."

"But by then you'll probably be done with the groceries and I won't have time to read all the other rows."

"We can hope." 

The lady in front of me, patiently waiting with all of her holiday grocery purchases for her turn to check out, indicated the December issue of Glamour magazine with a tilt of her head. "Just be glad she didn't see that one." 

In bold, clear print it read: "7 Things You Should Never Do To A Man In Bed."

I silently wished every cover designer of every such magazine would have to go down a check-out lane with their son or daughter or niece or nephew and answer questions like Sheila's. I naively imagined if they did we might see magazine covers in cursive or Roman sanskrit. Or, maybe they'd make a deal with stores to display the magazines somewhere else. 

The line was going nowhere. Sheila would be back way too soon. (The aspirin not soon enough.) Too soon for me to have time to successfully negotiate borrowing the large holiday tablecloth from the shopper in the next lane to drape over the magazine rack.

I turned the front Glamour magazine around, so its you-must-read-this-to-have-a-successful-relationship blurbs wouldn't show. But what if she read it on another copy around the corner?

Right then and there I decided I'd better have something to tell her if she wanted to know what those seven things were that you should never do to a man in bed.

1. Shave his legs while he's asleep.

2. Glue socks to his feet.

3. Fill his pillow with crawdads.

4. Fasten a flashlight to the ceiling above his head and wake him up, yelling "They're baaack!"

5. Place icy-cold toes in his armpit.

6. Tell him you've been looking at the bald spot on the back of his head, trying to decide whether it looks more like the silhouette of Garfield or Snoopy.

7. Say, just as he's dozing off, "The oil in the car needs changed and the doctor called to say your cholesterol is too high and aren't the taxes due?"

From here on out, or until she's 20, I'm only getting groceries while she's at school. What will I do next summer? I don't know yet. But, if you happen to drop by our place in the weeks between swimming lessons and the library program, please bring milk and bananas.

My Chocolate Chip Cookie Theory of Religion

There’s something mystical about made-from-scratch chocolate-chip cookies.  Nobody’s look like anybody else’s.  Watch the crowd at any school bake sale, and you’ll see kids pointing out cookies and saying, “My mom made those.”  They know this because chocolate-chip cookies have the peculiarity of being distinct by maker. 

I was 30 before it hit me that just because my cookies don’t look like my mother’s it didn’t mean I was doing anything wrong or that she was lying about her recipe.  (A relative went to her grave without telling anyone her secret recipe for raisin-cream pie, so I know some folks take that sort of thing pretty seriously.)  

Most chocolate-chip cookie recipes are pretty similar – flour, brown sugar, white sugar, butter, egg, vanilla, baking soda & chocolate chips.  But it isn’t merely differences in ingredients that make cookies different, because my daughter and I can use ingredients from the same containers and still our cookies don’t look like each other’s.  Somewhere in the steps between gathering ingredients and the end product, we add an individual touch without even meaning to. 

Same concept, same ingredients, individual results.  So, if I can’t put eight things together and end up with the exact same thing as someone else, how am I supposed to put together several thousand ideas, thoughts, and feelings and end up with the same notions about God as someone else?    

This has led me to develop my Chocolate Chip Cookie Theory of Religion.  This theory is still being fine-tuned, but the basic premise is that I’m allowed to question whatever I want to question as long as I still end up with The Cookie. 

Here’s an example of how this works.  Some chocolate chip cookie recipes call for salt.  I read a book that says many recipes call for minor amounts of salt because years ago it was a way of making sure everyone got enough iodine from iodized salt, and even after that was no longer a problem the habit remained.  So I don’t put salt in my cookies.  Do I still get cookies?  Yes.  Do I make fun of people who still use salt?  No.  Do I demand that everyone make this change?  No.  If the self-proclaimed Infallible Grand Poobah of Cookies released a writ condemning Personal Salt Decisions, would I go back to the original recipe?  No.

It’s not like I’m changing the flour to hamburger and the sugar to bread crumbs and ending up with meatloaf and trying to call it a cookie.  That would just be crazy.  It would also be crazy if I encouraged The Worldwide Order of the Cookie to divide up into groups based on details, and discouraged them from communicating with each other or studying The Cookie together.  Why, something as wacky as that could lead to divisive statements:

            “This isn’t what I’m used to!! You added nuts!” 

“Those kooks use imitation vanilla instead of pure vanilla extract.”

“Coconut?  Are you some kind of a freak?”

            “You can’t come here – you use insulated pans and we use flat aluminum.” 

“Margarines only pray with other Margarines – you’re a Butter.” 

            “The Grand Poobah says only men can set the oven to preheat!” 

         
The Grand Poobah is so out of touch with reality.  No wonder Aunt Francis only ever made pie.

The facts go marching one by one

In one of my favorite movies, “The Girl in the Café,” the two main characters jokingly discuss whether Reykjavik, Iceland, might be the kind of thing about which everyone knows only one fact.

Ants are one of those kinds of things. Some people know ants can carry 50 times their own weight, or that fire ants can kill birds and small mammals. Others know several species of ants capture other ants and use them as slaves, that some ants keep aphids and milk them like cows, or that all species of ants are social.

A recent study at the University of Bristol in England is attempting to add to the list of facts about ants by claiming that ants teach one another.

In the journal Nature, Nigel Franks is quoted as saying, “Within the field of animal behavior, we would say an animal is a teacher if it modifies behavior in the presence of another, at cost to itself, so another individual can learn more quickly.”

Because the researchers gathered such detailed analysis of ant behavior over quite a length of time, Franks feels strongly that the ants are actually passing along information about routes in a way consistent with teaching. They observed leader ants paying attention to follower ants, slowing down if they got behind and speeding up when the followers got closer. Follower ants even tapped the leaders with their antennae when they’d mastered a section, which made the leader go to the next part of the lesson.

When the leaders went on the route by themselves, they went four times faster than when they were showing other ants the way.

An article in the Washington Post by Shankar Vedantam points out that Nigel Franks’ paper has started an argument about what, exactly, can be labeled as teaching.

Is teaching just communication of information? If I tell a child where the silverware drawer is, have I taught them anything? Or just given them information?

How you answer depends on your definition of teaching.

Marc Hauser, a professor at Harvard, says a transfer of information isn’t teaching – teaching requires that the student learn a new skill. For example, giving a child the information that 2 plus 2 equals 4 counts as teaching only if they grasp the underlying concept of addition and become able to go on and add other numbers.

In the Washington Post article, “Ants Are First Non-Humans to Teach, Study Says,” Hauser talks about research done by Tim Caro which shows that cheetah mothers “…gradually allow their cubs to do more of the hunting – going, for example, from killing a gazelle and allowing young cubs to eat to merely tripping the gazelle and letting the cubs finish it off.” Of this, Hauser points out, “...the mother was not really teaching the cubs to hunt but merely facilitating various stages of learning.”

This guy is tough to please.

Handing over of facts isn’t teaching. Facilitating stages of learning isn’t teaching. According to him, only a genuine skill existing inside the student that wasn’t there before allows anyone to truthfully say they’ve taught someone.

While I would never want teaching to consist of ONLY a transfer of facts, it seems to me the teaching of skill can’t happen without a base of facts being given. And it would be impossible to pinpoint the dividing line.

Teaching historical facts about wars and treaties turns into the skill of understanding the types of things that start and end conflict.

Teaching the periodic table of the elements leads to the skill of being able to correctly predict the stability of various elements in different situations.

Good teachers can tell the difference between the students who have facts without yet having developed the desired skill, and the students who have both. But this doesn’t mean teachers know exactly how or when the kids in the second group graduated from the first group.

Bert Holldobler and Edward Wilson list a number of facts in their book, Journey to the Ants. Such as: There are one million trillion (10 with eighteen zeroes) insects alive at any one moment; ten thousand trillion of those insects are ants; the combined total weight of ants on earth is roughly equal to the total weight of humans; about 9,500 species of ants are known, and scientists believe at least twice as many species of ants have yet to be discovered.

Franks and Hauser may debate whether being given this information teaches us anything, but there’s no question that every bit of information we gain – even if it’s only one fact about ants or Reykjavik – builds a framework that makes learning more likely.

Fixed Fish Fights, Bystanders & Logic

Fish use logic. There, I managed to type it. Not with a straight face, but still, there it is in print I created. The implications for this are so vast I don't know where to begin. Probably I should begin with something that helps you believe me.

The January 25, 2007, issue of the journal Nature has a paper by Stanford scientists Logan Grosenick, Tricia Clement, and Russell Fernald entitled, "Fish can infer social rank by observation alone."

The researchers had a swell time setting up a system of rigged fights that was viewed by "bystander" fish who were later tested on what they'd grasped from watching the series of encounters.

All of the fish involved were male fish of the Astatotilapia burtoni variety, which are ferociously territorial. In Lake Tanganyika, home turf for the species, the fish "engage in regular aggressive bouts that determine their access to territory and resources."

But they do not engage in fights just for the heck of it, because if they lose more than they win they end up "losing their bright coloration and becoming reproductively dormant." Which is even less fun than it sounds like. Eager to keep their colors and their virility, each fish - similar to a drunk cowboy with a chip on his shoulder but not a death wish - prefers to fight someone they think they can whip.

The experiment was designed to see if fish could put two and two together successfully. Five fighters, A, B, C, D, and E, were paired in matches in which Fish A beat Fish B, Fish B beat Fish C, Fish C beat Fish D, and Fish D beat fish E.

The bystander fish never saw Fish A fight Fish E. Therefore, if a bystander fish preferred fighting Fish E instead of Fish A, it would mean the bystander had used logic to make this choice.

The bystanders made the right choice.

To make sure there wasn't something specific about a particular fish that helped with the selection, the fish labeled "Fish A" for half of the bystanders was given the role of "Fish E" for each of the other bystanders. Who also made the right choice.

How do you rig a fish fight? Well, the scientists knew a fish in his home area had an advantage because of Astatotilapia burtoni's natural tendency to "vigorously defend their territory against intruding rivals." So they moved the fish designated to lose into the tank of the fish designated to win. And, prior to doing that, the designated loser was "stressed twice by suspension out of water for 30 [seconds]" with a one-minute reprieve in between.

The little fellahs had all the hope of a baseball team in the Super Bowl. But their losses were all in the name of science, and I for one am grateful. Because of these fish, I'm more optimistic about elected officials.

It wasn't just that the bystanders had the intellect to figure out fighting Fish E would be wiser than fighting Fish A - they even deduced that fighting fish D was smarter than fighting Fish B, even though B and D both won and lost the same number of bouts.

Like it had been with A and E, the bystander fish never saw B and D fight each other. And since the bystanders saw D win just as many fights as B, their preference for D could only come from the fish figuring out the ranking system.

Initially, it was impossible to contain my joy. If these fish have a basic grasp of logic, surely there's hope for Congress. If fish can correctly manage their way through an "if this, then that" situation, certainly human beings in Congress have the skill, even if it's buried way deep under apathy, greed, and the over-riding desire to get re-elected even at the cost of a future for the world. ...Then I remembered a basic difference between the fish and Congress. The fish were motivated.

The fish needed to figure out the ranking in order to remain ongoing participants in the life of their species. Currently Congress is not motivated to use their intellect to forge a better future through an honest assessment of facts and open debate of diverse ideas. Evidence has shown them the best route to survival is pandering to huge corporations and lying to voters.

It is up to us to make it so members of Congress lose color and become "reproductively dormant" when they repeatedly are visionless and self-centered.

Elected o-fish-cials should be required to get a clue.

Arguing for an alternative metaphor

In their book, Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson say American culture views arguments in terms of physical battle, and that this is revealed in the way we talk about arguing. We say things like: “He attacked every weak point; His criticisms were right on target; With that strategy, she’ll wipe you out; She shot down all the arguments.”

Lakoff and Johnson say our view of “argument is war” goes far beyond our methods of speech, into our behaviors. They say “it structures the actions we perform in arguing.” Attacking and defending become the order of the day, and feelings of gaining or losing ground are inseparable from the issues under discussion.

“The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another,” say Lakoff and Johnson. They note that quite a lot of us may never consciously associate argument with war, but the fact remains that “argument is partially structured, understood, performed, and talked about in terms of war,” and it is, in the U.S., the “ordinary way of having an argument and talking about one.”

So when republicans and democrats see each other as opponents to be stomped into the dirt, it may not only be out of cussedness, or a quirky desire to be as ineffective as is humanly possible. It may in part be due to the fact that our country is currently lacking a metaphor for argument that could help them out.

Right now they see anybody who disagrees as an opponent, and they face every discussion in terms of beating the other side or getting beaten. What we need is a metaphor that would allow for clearer thinking. Something that promotes a point of view where solving problems is winning, and not solving problems is losing.

Something to get rid of the attitude that says, “I will do any stupid, counterproductive, devastatingly backwards, chuckleheaded, and ill-informed thing as long as my team came up with it, because that’s still winning.”

Lakoff and Johnson talk about what arguments would be like in a culture where “argument is dance” replaces “argument is war.” For one thing, winning wouldn’t be destruction of the other person or group – it would be figuring out how to get better and better at keeping things moving despite differences.

They wrote the book in 1979, and an Afterword in 2003, where they express frustration at those who see metaphors as “a mere matter of words” and not as something that shapes thought and behavior. They point out that if one spouse’s metaphorical concept for marriage is of a partnership forging ahead, and the other spouse’s concept is marriage as a haven from the outside world, the thoughts and behaviors shaped by those metaphors will be very different. “Because we reason in terms of metaphor, the metaphors we use determine a great deal about how we live our lives.”

Well, I’m game. If adopting a different metaphor for argument has a microscopic chance of helping Congress put their heads together on wars, the economy and healthcare, I’m for it.

Dancing is good. We need a new rhythm for moving forward.

Six word combination is a great writing tool

Some people have said to me, off and on over the years, that things tend to show up in life when you need them. The front-row parking space in the rain when you have a sick child to carry. The sofa bed at the garage sale the same day old friends call to say they’re coming to spend a long weekend.

What makes these incidents so cool is the fact that timing just isn’t that perfect most days. Many times the front-row parking space isn’t open until you’re carrying the sick child out to the far side of the lot wrapped in an improvised grocery-bag rain cape, and the sofa bed isn’t spotted until the last afternoon of the out-of-towners’ visit.

I didn’t read the following information in Natalie Angier’s book, The Canon, until the day after a four-flight trip concluded: “You would have to fly on a commercial airline every day for 18,000 years, he tells them, before your chances of being in a crash would exceed 50 percent. You want to know what 18,000 years looks like? Think ‘twice as far back as the dawn of agriculture.’”

It was two days after the flights before I remembered the box of Kiwanis peanuts in our kitchen, and considered how fun it would be to have taken those along and shared the packets with other travelers in the now peanutless skies.

But I did come across the book of six-word memoirs, Not Quite What I Was Planning, in just the nick of time. I was attempting to journal some notes about our family vacation to Puerto Rico, working at jotting down enough information to capture my favorite parts and be able to resurrect the sights, sounds, and emotions at some distant future point, but without making the project such a slog that I would lose all motivation to do it. Procrastinating, I flipped through Not Quite What I Was Planning, making a list of the brief memoirs that appealed most to me:

“Afraid of everything. Did it anyway.” Ayse Erginer

“Slightly psychotic, in a good way.” Patricia Neelty

“Macular degeneration. Didn’t see that coming.” Ian Gould

“Found true love, married someone else.” Bjorn Stromberg

“Followed white rabbit. Became black sheep.” Gabrielle Maconi

“Seventy years, few tears, hairy ears.” Bill Querengesser

Later, taking pen in hand again, it occurred to me that if these people could pack such a punch in only six words about their lives, there was every reason to believe my vacation journaling could be done in the same style. I may never journal any other way again.

Denver morning, Dallas afternoon, island evening.

Speak Spanish to taxidriver, learn words.

Seaside trail, fort walls, history calls.

Unique fountains call for open enjoyment.

Rent car, get lost, buy map.

110 miles by 40 is huge.

Roadside stand, unusual food, super breakfast.

Climb rainforest tower, see for miles.

The Atlantic seems deeper from here.

When in rain forest, bring umbrellas.

Husband, daughter, in waterfall; I’m dry.

Noisy forest full of loud frogs.

Winding, switchback roads, with papaya trees.

This map is not to scale.

East side to west side, awesome.

Arecibo radio telescope, reading the sky.

Thunder is louder in the mountains.

Rincón sounds beautiful, and it is.

Lemon Tree, home away from home.

You can drink the water here.

Bright sunny mornings, cozy rainy afternoons.

Crystal clear water, turquoise swimming beach.

Caribbean has more colors in person.

Large brown pelicans dive straight down.

Nurse sharks don’t bother with people.

Rainy day, long book, sheer joy.

There’s even time to cook here.

Popcorn tastes better by the sea.

Graduated daughter, college soon, together today.

Early morning, looong walk, late breakfast.

Snorkeling gear, sunny water, jeweled fish.

Collecting with daughter, memories and shells.

We laugh more while on vacation.

Hermit crabs have interesting, full lives.

Fire ants know people like shade.

Dairy cows near beach watch people.

Some dogs swim in the surf.

I’m surprised we remembered the sunscreen.

We should have photographed the eel.

Some fishermen share with the birds.

Jellyfish can be returned to life.

When walking a beach, have pockets.

Sometimes shells are still being used.

Tides come in when not expected.

It’s always worth looking around corners.

Thunderstorms cause waves that bring coconuts.

Ron can open coconuts without machetes.

Suitcases have been known to shrink.

The return drive is new, too.

Remember, map is not to scale.

Sheila accidentally finds culinary festival downtown.

Learning languages makes more stories available.

Learn more about the Chupacabra legend.

Puerto Rico is two flights away.

Next time I’m taking the peanuts.

Lysistrata - a vehicle for discussion

Lysistrata – a vehicle for discussion

Tammy Hansen Snell

When my daughter Sheila grew old enough to read my favorite books, I experienced a deep sense of joy. When she grew old enough to recommend books to me, the well of joy expanded exponentially.

The writer Joe Queenan calculated he could read 2138 more books, if he lives to his normal life expectancy. He broke this down into types: “500 masterpieces, 500 minor classics, 500 overlooked works of genius, 500 oddities and 138 examples of high-class trash.” I don’t know if he reads faster or slower than I do, but he has made me a far more finicky reader than I would have been without this thought of a finite number.

Books hold vast mysteries, hysterical anecdotes, and awe-inspiring insights. With every book I learn more about myself, enjoy more about others, and expand my experiences of the world a thousand-fold. The vast number of exhilarating and heartwarming experiences dormant in books, waiting for me to crack them open and become aware of them, gives every spare moment of the day glorious potential.

There is never any danger of running short, because no matter how choosy I get, or how rigorously I set my standards – there are still a few million books from which to select. A few million is no exaggeration – even with the unbending requirement that they make me gasp with delight and teach me something – and that’s been without expanding the scope back before 0 B.C., a time period I’ve narrow-mindedly been ignoring.

Without Sheila’s recommendation, I would have remained unaware of the chuckles, blushes, and aha moments held in the pages of a play written in 411 B.C. “Mom,” she said, “You ought to take a look at this play I’m reading – Lysistrata.” And with that she handed me the map to a goldmine. Thanks, honey.

Lysistrata sounds like an awesome name for a car. “New for 2012 – the sleek, fuel-efficient Toyota Lysistrata!” Or a dog. “Meet our Labrador Retriever, Lysistrata – she catches Frisbees.” Lysistrata was written by Aristophanes. (Another great name, but his doesn’t work as well on a car.) Aristophanes lived from 448 to 385 B.C., during the Peloponnesian War, which involved fierce fighting between Athens and Sparta. It started in 460 B.C. and lasted until 404 B.C, with only a minimal time of peace from 445 to 431.

Lysistrata is the main character in the play, and my new hero. She is one tough cookie, with the charisma and panache to carry out an ingenious peace plan. She calls together Athenian, Spartan, Boeotian, and Corinthian women, all of them married, and all tired of losing husbands and sons to war. “All the hopes of all the States are anchored on us women,” she tells them, urging them all to agree to her plan of withholding themselves from their husbands until the men stop fighting and arrange for lasting peace. The women aren’t wild about this, but know that Lysistrata is right – unless they force change by refusing to have sex, the men will always go to war.

The women take over the Acropolis, locking themselves inside. It doesn’t take long before the men are outraged, and their chorus sings, “What coaxing rogues are ye! That was quite a true opinion which a wise man gave about you. We can’t live with such tormentors, no, by Zeus, nor yet without you.” (And now we now how old THAT line is.) The men try to force their way in, and fail, and eventually agree to talk peace.

Lysistrata reminds the armies of what they have in common, and the times each region of men has helped the other. She gets them to make a treaty, settling arguments over disputed territory. (The fact that a woman named Reconciliation stands in as a map makes me think Aristophanes wrote plays that were the Ancient Greek equivalent of The Daily Show.)

Before everybody goes back to their respective homes with their spouses, they feast together. Afterwards, one ambassador says to another, “We were wondrous witty in our cups.” The second answers, “Ay, ‘tis when we’re sober we’re so daft. Now if the State would take a friend’s advice, ‘twould make its envoys always all get drunk. When we go dry to Sparta, all our aim is just to see what mischief we can do. We don’t hear aught they say; and we infer a heap of things they never said at all.” International relations explained, 2419 years ago.

Unlike Queenan, I don’t categorize the books I read – and it’s a good thing. I could make arguments for Lysistrata to be in any of Queenan’s classifications – masterpiece, minor classic, overlooked work of genius, oddity, and high-class trash. Instead I’ll just classify it as DWR – definitely worth reading.