A little browsing. First, following up on my summary of Dr. Vitz's article "Pyschology in Recovery", the article is now on line here.
I found several other articles that related to things I have been thinking and writing about. The common threads are rationalism & the Enlightenment, religion, and faith. I haven't worked out what I want to say about them and I wanted to park the links.
This entry reviews a psychological self-help book. I am co-publishing the review at Blogcritics. I wrote this to follow up on my entry about Pyschology in Recovery and look at some ideas in modern psychology. It includes some ideas on fighting depression and pessimism and leading a happy life.
I also noticed this review by Daniel Pick, at the Guardian Online, of two other books about happiness.
Steve, Mike and I rode on Sunday at Bird's Hill, as we did on the last Sunday in March last year. Steve has notes and pictures in his cycling log entry for March 27. Mike has a picture in his blog entry. He has to add a table and some code (with Steve's tech support) to fire up his cycling log for 2005.
On Saturday I made a low calorie vegetarian lasagna, and it turned out very well - tasty and filling. I took the recipe from the Canadian Living 2005 Crockpot Cooking special issue, and I adapted it.
March 25, snow on the ground, temperature below freezing - the first ride of the season.
[Updated entry]. There was a documentary on The Fifth Estate on CBC TV about crystal meth, Dave's addiction. It was on the regular network on March 23, 2005 and was played on the Newsworld cable channel several times later in the week. After the show premiered, CBC set up a Dark Crystal microsite which has streaming video links (Windows Media and Quicktime) to the 42 minute documentary. I thought it was a competent and comprehensive show, which communicated basic information about the effects and availability of the drug, and some information about treatment of the addiction. It might have said a few more things on some issues.
The History Channel in Canada broadcast "The Real Da Vinci Code" as a two hour show last night (March 23/05). Actor, journalist and politician Tony Robinson was the narrator and he brought a comic and sarcastic presence, honed in his appearances as Baldrick in Rowan Atkinson's "Blackadder" shows, to his role as debunker of modern myths.
A couple of links. Kill the Buddha started as an Internet project and turned into a book. I have heard the authors interviewed on the radio. Their project sounds different from the conventional posturing of people who want to be "spiritual" without being "religious", although that seems to be their starting point. One of the KtB writers has gone on to launch The Revealor, an Internet survey of religious writing.
After a two week break, I skied last Sunday (March 13), and I got out again on Thursday, and today. The spring sunshine is melting the snow even though the temperatures are still mainly below the freezing point. The ski season may be ending, although a cold spell and a few millimeters of new powder (or klister) could extend it.
Two BBC news stories from Europe on the Girbaud poster and billboard campaign. A French Court has banned the poster - apparently throughout France. The municipal authorities in Milan banned the picture on billboards. The picture, which is in the linked stories, has Hot female models posed as Christ and the Apostles as in Leonardo da Vinci's painting of The Last Supper.
The clever and ironic title of this article in the current issue of First Things magazine, caught my attention. Paul C. Vitz, Emeritus Professor of Pyschology at New York University discusses "positive psychology", a movement or approach identified by Martin Seligman, a former president of the American Psychological Association. I borrowed Dr. Seligman's book Authentic Happiness from the library. He started to promote positive psychology in 1998, in concert with Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, the author of "Flow" and some others.
It's Wednesday, and for the last 4 of 5 weeks, perhaps longer, that's porn spam day. It doesn't show up on my site, but my Blacklist log shows the comment and ping denials. I get a few email notifications telling me that some made it into moderation (until I installed MT-Moderate for Trackbacks, some pings showed up on the site).
This entry started as a book review published at Blogcritics, and has turned into an essay. The book in question was written by Francis Wheen, an English columnist and writer. It was published in England, in 2004, as How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions. In the US it was titledIdiot Proof. The dust jacket described the subjects and scope of the book as "Deluded Celebrities, Irrational Power Brokers, Media Morons and the Erosion of Common Sense".
Late last week Jay Allen, the designer of MT-Blacklist posted recommending a plug-in called MT-Moderate and some other anti-spam tools. MT-Moderate originally force-moderated comments, which is basically one of the things that MTB does, but it has been redesigned to force-moderate trackback pings too. That was a privacy hole in MTB (and MT) which doesn't have a trackback moderation feature. Some blog spammers send pings - usually in large waves. If they managed to evade the MTB blacklist scan, the pings got into the public site. Spam comments that got around the blacklist, on the other hand, usually ended up in moderation.
I thought this review was useful for mentioning that the word "boring" and the usage of "interesting" as "not boring" seem to have entered the language only about 250 years ago.
I added a site to my aggregator after finding this Guardian Article through Butterflies and Wheels News.
The site is Arts & Letters Daily. I am enjoying it for all of the reasons mentioned in the Guardian article - and especially for wide interests, good writing and fidelity to logic and reality.
"Semi-Tough" was on TV last night. I saw it in a theater back in 1977. Unfortunately it wasn't in the TV guide, I didn't know it was coming on, and I didn't set a tape. Then my sweet Claire insisted on watching "Dead Like Me". Damn. (Double damn - I really don't like the lead actress although it's fun to watch Mandy Patinkin in a solid role). I hope it's on again soon.
Claire turned 20 today. I continue to be amazed by her intellect and her talent, impressed by her increasing maturity and self-reliance. She has witnessed and tolerated my ups and downs for the last year. I love her dearly.
The second season of Deadwood has started on Movie Central with Episode 13, "A Lie Agreed Upon (Part 1)". Deadwood, like other HBO shows, has started numbering episodes by absolute consecutive numbers. Movie Central uses the absolute episode number in its online program guides.
A little positive news. My weight has been going up over the winter. I have been going through a reality check around diet and exercise over the last several weeks. I have made some changes, and I am starting to notice the results.
My friend Randy Reichardt, a librarian by profession, blogged about the Gorman controversy in separate entries today and yesterday. Michael Gorman is the president-elect of the American Libary Association. In December 2004 he wrote an essay in the LA Times which criticized Google's project to digitize entire libraries. His article was discussed in some blogs. Some of the discussion was thoughtful and well-informed, some was polite and some wasn't. People sent him clips of some of the more colourful things some bloggers were saying. Then he wrote a piece in the Library Journal online dismissing blogs and bloggers. (Information and relevant links in Randy's entries linked above).
There was a movie on TV tonight: "Their Eyes were Watching God". Halle Berry is in it and Oprah Winfrey produced it. The description of the movie in the newspaper was a young Florida woman's quest for self-fulfillment in the 1920's. The digital TV guide described it as the odyssey of a free spirit through stormy romances. After I noticed this show in the program guide, I search for information about the book and the writer online, and checked a couple reviews of the movie online. I watched the first half of the show before tuning out.
The weather turned ugly today. It had been warm on Saturday, with some good melting. The forecast for today had held the potential for skiing - cooler temperatures and fresh snow. The warm temperatures persisted until midday when sleet and freezing rain started. I decided to stay home. It might have been ok in the woods but the wind and snow were making the roads treacherous. On a positive note, I got upper body workouts yesterday and today with my long-handled ice chisel. I chopped back some of the ice and snow behind my garage, opened some drainage for my neighbours' parking pad (they moved from Victoria and still haven't figured out what hit them, opened the sewer grate at the end of the back lane, and opened the grate in the curb in front of my neighbours' Jim and Sharon's house. I should shoot some digital pictures of the great rows of snow on the boulevard before they melt further.
Here's another philosophy primer by Mortimer J. Adler, brief, well-organized and to the point. He wrote "Ten Philosophical Mistakes" in 1985. He was trying to explain why he had identified himself with Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas in his autobiography. He identifies some key ideas associated with a series of philosophers, including Hobbes, Locke, Descartes, Hume, Kant and criticizes their failings. His own ideas on these points go back in some instances to Aristotle and Aquinas, but in other instances he relies on modern criticism of the thinkers of the Enlightenment and the early modern era.
There was an ad in the first section of today's Free Press (Sat. March 5/05) for herbal and fiber "cleansing" products. It talked about getting rid of toxins by 7 cleansing channels - didn't say which channels. The two channels that get the most attention in the marketplace are colon (aka bowel or large intestine) and kidney/bladder. Google "cleansing" or "cleansing toxins" and see what the engine drags from the dregs of the Web.
The Canadian Catholic Bishops have been trying to get Catholics involved in motivating Members of Parliament to oppose Bill C-38, which deals with same-sex marriage. Last Sunday at the 8:00 AM Sunday Mass St. Ignatius, instead of delivering a homily, Father Monty presented the Archbishop of Winnipeg's Pastoral letter (available here in pdf format). Yesterday, I read in a newspaper that Fred Henry, the Bishop of Calgary, suggested on a Toronto Radio show that the Prime Minister of Canada, who is a Catholic, should be excommunicated for supporting Bill C-38.
The Canadian Parliament has been debating a Bill relating to same-sex marriage. Bill C-38 says: "Marriage, for civil purposes, is the lawful union of two persons to the exclusion of all others." This would replace or alter the legal definition of marriage, which had been established by judicial precedent in 1866 as "the voluntary union for life of one man and one woman, to the exclusion of all others." People of the same sex will be considered to have the legal capacity to make a marriage contract, and if married, to divorce and divide their property in accordance with provincial marital property laws, and to claim other legal benefits and rights accruing to the married state.
I noticed "Letters to a Young Catholic" by George Weigel in the library, read it, liked it, and posted a review at Blogcritics back in December. I decided to rewrite the review and put it up on my own site too.
After Steve's comments on my last entry (Portion Advice) about Weightwatcher points, I looked at the labels on a few 355 ml (12 oz) beverage cans. The Safeway house brand root beer and regular cola have 162 and 161 calories per can, respectively. Diet Coke has 2 calories per can. Schweppe's diet ginger ale, 0 calories. Schweppes Tonic Water - 130 calories. Canada Dry Tonic - not marked. Presidents Choice Brew (0.5 percent beer) is 65 calories per can. I have some regular beer in the house, but beer labels don't have nutritional data. I dug up some information.
Yesterday I wrote about portion sizes, complaining that good nutritional information tends to be published alongside luxuriously unhealthy recipes and other consumption-oriented material. On Wednesday the Free Press basically turns its Life and Entertaiment section into a Food section, with articles about cooking, recipes and a wine column. Today, I found an article out of the Canadian Press covering the start of Nutrition Month - March is Nutrition month for the Dieticians of Canada. This year they are emphasizing portion size.
Last week the Free Press was running ads for Deepak Chopra's visit to Winnipeg among the movie ads in the entertainment section. The show is called "An Evening with Deepak Chopra", it's at the Concert Hall on April 21, and ticket prices are from $45.00 to $150.00. Chopra is a best-selling author, an inspirational speaker, and he is associated with a luxury retreat spa. This article by Guardian columnist and author Francis Wheen estimated his income at $20 million a year, including $8 million from the retreat center.
I watched the Academy Awards show on TV on Sunday. I loved the actresses in their gowns. Eye candy. The Naughty Vicar was demanding to be heard. I loved Chris Rock, especially that skit where he interviewed people (I recognized some so I assume some of them were actors) about their favourite movies and got answers like Chronicles of Riddick and White Chicks. Hilarious. Hollywood likes to think of itself as a community of independent artists instead of a commercial community because it give awards to high class commercial movies instead of low class commercial movies.
I saw the Winnipeg premiere of "Pro, A Feature Documentary" last night at the Imax theater in Portage Place. Woodcock Cycle, had promoted it at their store, on their web site, and through the Manitoba Cycling Association. The theater was nearly full, and I think most of the audience were fairly dedicated cyclists.
This won't be a stunning insight for many people. I knew it in an abstract way, but I haven't made a serious effort to live with it. If I, as an adult, am gaining weight in spite of regular exercise, I am eating too much. I eat too much because I eat what I buy or cook, and I am buying and serving large portions.
