Actually, Dale “Parenting Beyond Belief” McGowan spent his first 10 years here. On his blog, “The Meming of Life” he has a speaking schedule posted. When he posted a solid date in my town, I posted about it and sent emails. So yesterday I drove out to the local Humanist hall. I got there early to take some snapshots with my tiny camera.

I went to Sunday School here, wearing a suit that one morning every week from the age of 4 till my early teens. One sure way to chase a kid from the fold is to make him dress up in stiff clothes known to inspire mocking from his peers. I hadn’t been back for 35 years. But it is a cool building!

Assembly hall ceiling in the Ethical Society

Glory, Glory light from above

Anyway, we were there to see a short talk on raising moral children who won’t be very susceptible to cults, fads, and other charismatic followings. McGowan is a good speaker. He has a pat routine, nuanced with assorted topical interludes. A sober talk, well punctuated with wit. He didn’t quite “plug” his next book, but it did get mentioned.

I sat in the back, just in front of Erich’s neice and her parents. So pardon the long shots.

Guitarist on the left, speakers on the right

A Long Shot from the cheap seats as Dale emphasizes a point

Afterward, a small crowd gathered for Q&A (and a couple of autographs).Many parents wanted more details on how to deal with inter-generational clashes of faith, or specific materials besides his own books to raise well rounded kids.

A comfortable, casual speaker, despite the suit

Authographs

But what is his message? Essentially, knowledge is power. Don’t teach your kids with arguments from authority, because one can always find a competing authority. Get them in the habit of working things out for themselves. Don’t protect them from faiths with which you disagree; expose them. Show them all the ideas and cultures they might want to consider. Let them reach conclusions. Even wrong ones. At least those that can’t really hurt them.

Inoculation is the way to keep your kids out of cults. Let them see how religious ecstasy affects people, so that they aren’t completely swept away by their first experience.

Note that neither McGowan nor the Ethical Society are anti-religion. The basic precept is Ethical Humanism, that <i>this</i> life is the one to be led well, with respect for others and yourself. Any afterlife that may exist, any deities that can be imagined, are subordinate to this.

Dan Klarmann’s photos of the cricket in his basement inspired me to grab my camera when I spied a tiny spider in my basement (it was about 4mm in diameter).   My daughter held a flashlight on him/her while I brought my camera within an inch of my subject.   I finally got a clear shot after the spider came to rest on the “ceiling” of a folded pieced of lined paper.  It might be fun to continue building up this collection of photos of critters we find in our basements.  If anyone else adds to this collection, just use the keywords “critters in the basement.”

To succeed as a musician who performs your own creations, you need a diverse skill set honed through hard experience.  Being able to play an instrument proficiently is merely one part of that package.  My recent interview of Leslie Sanazaro Santi reminded me of the many skills one must develop, as well as the immense amount energy one must invest, in order to have a successful career of performing one’s own music.   Truly, the performing musician’s skill set includes virtually every one of the multiple intelligences set forth by Howard Gardner.

I first met Leslie Sanazaro more than a year ago, at a weekly farmer’s market at Tower Grove Park in St. Louis (Leslie was recently married and she is just beginning to use her new name: Leslie Sanazaro Santi). While staring at some vegetables, I heard some captivating music about 30 yards away.  Helpless to resist the siren song, I walked up toward the sound-source and took a seat on a folding chair.  Ten feet from me, a woman rocked on her keyboard bench as she sang and played, her whole body “dancing” with her rhythms and her foot actively stomping out the beats. It was obvious that this was a musician who truly felt her music and believed in it.  She had no drum machine nor any other gimmicks.  What I heard was straight-forward first-rate music.  It occurred to me that she seemed too serious about her music to be playing for an audience of only a dozen people at a local market.

My brother-in-law Steve, an accomplished blues and jazz musician, soon joined me in the small audience. We agreed that we were listening to an impressive performer and composer. After staying for a full set, I told Leslie I enjoyed her music, I handed her $10 for a copy of her CD, “Stars in the Attic,” and I signed up for e-mail updates regarding her future performances.

For the next year, I received mass-distributed e-mails every week or two indicating Leslie’s playing schedule, mostly at venues in or near the City of St. Louis. Eventually, her e-mails indicated that she was going on a tour through Asia, playing dozens of shows before returning to St. Louis.  In September, 2008, the e-mails indicated that Leslie had released a new CD entitled “On Your Roof.”  It sounded like things were going her way.

About a month ago, I visited Leslie’s site at “Reverb Nation,” to listen to several of her new tunes from “On Your Roof.”  Bottom line: this CD is impressive.  Her music has ratcheted up to a new level and the clean studio product spared no attention to detail. More than ever, I was impressed with Leslie’s high quality voice work and the sparkling cadence of her lyrics.  In order to fully understand my motivation for this elaborate (and yes, glowing) profile of Leslie Sanazaro Santi, take a moment to visit Reverb Nation and listen to a few of her tunes (I especially recommend listening to “Put on Your Shoes” and “Hot and Cold” to hear some of the many impressive things she can do with her voice).

[Part I]

About one week ago, after receiving yet another mass-distributed e-mail, I decided to listen to Leslie’s music live at a local wine bar.  This time, I was part of a crowd of 100 people. Once again, I was impressed with the performance.  During her breaks, Leslie walked about the big room to greet those who had come to hear her play.  She knew many of the people by name and it was obvious that she had a loyal following of people who really appreciate her work.

At the end of the night, I introduced myself and asked Leslie whether she would allow me to tell her story to DI’s readers. I suggested that many people, including young musicians and songwriters, might appreciate a chance to learn from her experience what it takes to succeed as a songwriter and performer.  She graciously accommodated me; we sat down for an interview on New Years’ Eve at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in downtown St. Louis.

The three videos that I’ve attached to this post are the result of that extended interview.   During the interview, one of my hunches was confirmed: not only is Leslie a proficient musician, but she is a thinking musician who is driven to constantly raise her own bar.  Clicking on these three videos will give you a chance to hear an articulate musician explaining her craft in detail. Perhaps you too to will find yourself intrigued by Leslie’s many observations about music, as well as her insights into human nature.  I assumed that this interview was going to be solely about music, but it turned out to be much broader and deeper: Leslie is a serious student and advocate of human communication and community-building.  These are conscious aims of her live music performances.

In my previous writings at this blog, I’ve mentioned that I once played music. When I was18, I became the co-leader of a nine-piece jazz-rock band (we played Doobie Brothers, Chicago, Blood Sweat and Tears).  I’ve thus tried my hand at writing music and performing music. I’m mentioning my background because my personal experience gives me a better-than-average foundation from which to understand the work of other musicians.  My musical background also motivated me to repeatedly steer the conversation toward “talking shop” with a serious musician.  Watching these videos will thus give you an insider’s view about how Leslie does what she does.  Much of the video serves as a clinic on the specific strategies Leslie employs for writing and performing her music.

I’ve also mentioned my own musical experience because I am one of the many (many) people who, as they reached adulthood, made a difficult choice at a prominent fork in the road. Would I pursue a career in music or would I pursue a more stable full-time job to allow a more “traditional“ existence?  Like most people, I chose not-music, a choice that occasionally haunts me.  My choice, many years ago, is another reason I find Leslie’s story compelling.  Based on my long-range choices, my reality is that I must live vicariously when it comes to performing music at the high level that Leslie is achieving.

I was delighted that Leslie turned out to be such an open book, but that she was also realistic about the things she wants to improve.  Despite her years of survival in a highly competitive industry, her entire interview was thoroughly upbeat, without any hint of cynicism–such a change of pace from so much of what we read and hear these days.  Leslie firmly believes that we all have music inside of us, and that all of us can use it to communicate out ideas.  This is an idea to which I can relate.

When I planned my interview with Leslie, I intended to discuss her music-craft long enough to produce a straightforward 10-minute video. Little did I know that I would end up more than an hour of videotape.  Cutting it down to three 10-minute sections involved many painful editing decisions.  Here’s how I ended up organizing the interview:

Part I – Introduction.  The importance of live music.  Meet Leslie Sanazaro Santi.  What makes a good song?

Part II - Working with Lyrics.  Writing about sensitive topics.  The process of creating a melody and lyrics.  [During this segment, please excuse the jackhammer in the background –the hotel was under construction].

Part III - Vocals. Vetting new songs.  Adjustments when playing solo.  Promoting one’s music.  Looking back at 2008.

[Part II]

I hope you enjoy watching these videotapes as much as I enjoyed talking with Leslie.  If you enjoyed these videos, check out her music, which you can purchase her music at many outlets, including iTunes, CDBaby or Amazonmp3 (links here).  To learn more about Leslie and her work, here’s her website.

[Part III]

Just when I think we’re making progress, we go and pull the one-step-forward-ten-steps-back trick.  First, a friend tells me about how her daughter was treated recently in a suburb of New York City.  The daughter is 17 and African-American, although my friend is Caucasian.  Her daughter was adopted from Sierre Leone in West Africa as a child.  She is a good student and a great kid, giving her parents just enough teen drama to keep them on their toes.  Her boyfriend is also black.

Last week, as blizzards were swirling through the area, my friend’s husband took their kids out to alleviate cabin fever before it set in completely.  This daughter and her boyfriend asked if they could stop at Dunkin Donuts for a drink and wait there while Dad delivered the other kids to the nearby library.  He agreed and dropped them off.  They ordered their drinks and food and stood by the door, sipping, talking and waiting for Dad to return.  Several other patrons sat or milled about, but the two teens were the only people of color in the place.  After less than 10 minutes had passed, the manager came out and rudely told the two of them that they had to leave or he’d call the police.  ”Why?” they asked.  Because we don’t allow loitering, they were told.  They told him their ride would arrive shortly, but he said he didn’t care.  He told them they’d have to wait outside.  

Remember the blizzard?  So these two kids, who were doing nothing wrong but being darker than the other donut-eaters, had to stand out in the wind and the snow and wait for her dad to arrive.  They called him on her cell, and you can rest assured he made it back there in record time.  He confronted the manager, who hemmed and hawed through his amazement that this man, this white man, was claiming to be her father, then finally admitted that no, they’d done nothing wrong.  They weren’t loud, they weren’t bothering anyone.  Dad even asked other patrons, and all agreed that the manager had been entirely out of line.  They left before any law enforcement arrived, but the damage had been done.  She was angry and hurt - and who can blame her?  She and her father are writing a letter to the local paper together, as they try to show her proactive ways to handle prejudice.  They will not spend another nickel in that Dunkin Donuts, nor will any of their friends, but who knows if that will have an impact.  Several friends advised calling the corporate offices to let them know that one of their franchisees is exhibiting blatant bigotry like this, but past that, what can my friend do?

Sue him?  That’s an option, sure.  But she realizes her child may not want to become the poster girl for bigotry - especially because she is already the black girl with white parents.  She has siblings of several colors, including her own biological sister, but not every kid has the temperament to take something like this on.

I find it appalling that this small-minded manager decided that he would actually vocalize his prejudice and without cause, send two well-behaved kids out into the snow.  What was he thinking?  ”Uh-oh, they’re gonna cause trouble, I just know it.  I know!  I’ll outfox ‘em and cut ‘em off at the pass, kick ‘em out before they have a chance to scare my other customers.”   Really???  In 2009??  Sometimes, living in the city and surrounding myself with generally kind and open-minded people, I honestly forget that the world is still full of idiots.  This was quite the reminder.

But we weren’t done treading backward, oh no.  The very next day, I read an article about a Muslim family taken off a plane, after they discussed the safest place to sit.  

From the Washington Post:  

Kashif Irfan, one of the removed passengers, said the incident began about 1 p.m. after his brother, Atif, and his brother’s wife wondered aloud about the safest place to sit on an airplane.

“My brother and his wife were discussing some aspect of airport security,” Irfan said. “The only thing my brother said was, ‘Wow, the jets are right next to my window.’ I think they were remarking about safety.”

Irfan said he and the others think they were profiled because of their appearance. He said five of the six adults in the party are of South Asian descent, and all six are traditionally Muslim in appearance, with the men wearing beards and the women in headscarves. Irfan, 34, is an anesthesiologist. His brother, 29, is a lawyer. Both live in Alexandria with their families, and both were born in Detroit. They were traveling with their wives, Kashif Irfan’s sister-in-law, a friend and Kashif Irfan’s three sons, ages 7, 4 and 2.

AirTran spokesman Tad Hutcheson agreed that the incident amounted to a misunderstanding. But he defended AirTran’s handling of the incident, which he said strictly followed federal rules. And he denied any wrongdoing on the airline’s part.

“At the end of the day, people got on and made comments they shouldn’t have made on the airplane, and other people heard them,” Hutcheson said. “Other people heard them, misconstrued them. It just so happened these people were of Muslim faith and appearance. It escalated, it got out of hand and everyone took precautions.”

Now just hold on a damned minute here.  Am I the only person who finds Hutcheson’s statement utterly reprehensible?  Comments they shouldn’t have made???  About the safety of airplanes, while sitting on an airplane?  No, what you meant to say, Mr. Hutcheson, is not that they “just so happened to be of the Muslim faith.”  What you meant to say was that “MUSLIMS got on and made comments they can’t make without EVERYONE ELSE freaking out, because we have been fed a constant stream of fear rhetoric by our government for so long that we are completely unable to think for our own flippin’ selves!”

The wronged family stated that the FBI agents who interviewed them and ultimately cleared them of any wrongdoing whatsoever were very professional and treated them well.  I have to say I was quite relieved to read that.  

But that doesn’t change the fact that this is ridiculous.  Only caricatures of terrorists in a bad political cartoon would get on a plane, with their children, and chat amongst themselves loudly enough for the people around them to hear, about where it is safe to sit.  Newsflash:  Terrorists rarely chat before blowing themselves up or hijacking planes.  Read any account of any thwarted terrorist action, and trust me, “chatting” is not going to be the clue that gave them away.

Newsflash #2:  When terrorists blow up airplanes, there is NO safe place to sit.  Not close to the jet engines, not far away from the jet engines.  It all goes up in horrible flames.  Just so you know.  

All you have to do is insert anyone else into that conversation, and you see how ridiculous it is.  I guarantee you that if I sat down on a plane with a friend, and we started arguing about which part of the plane is safest, the most we would get is a look of annoyance from our seatmate who wants to start his nap. No one would think twice about whether or not we were dangerous.  The 9/11 terrorists succeeded in giving our government the ammunition it needed to turn the general American public into a flock of fearful lemmings.  

Religious dress is a right in this country, yet we use it to profile Muslims and treat them disrespectfully and suspiciously - and I find it horrifying.  The damage *some* priests have done to thousands of children over the past few decades in this country is horrifying, but we don’t stop priests from interacting with children or humiliate them in public simply because they’re wearing clerical collars, do we?  I’ve not heard that one, at least not yet.  Some of them are pedophiles, why not all of them?  Oh, wait, that’s right - we can’t stereotype like that, now can we?  

No.  Of course not.  We only do that to black teenagers and Muslims in traditional dress.  Oh, and gays.  And, well, other black people.  And some brown people.  And everyone who isn’t exactly like me.  So there.

This is another post based on a comment by our online frenemy, Karl K. He said,

“So naturalists get to have their certainty and be skeptics at the same time and never be at risk of being proven in error because their certainty is based on something that cannot be directly observed. Very convenient.”

But the study of nature has no absolutes. The conclusions, like the law of gravity or the photoelectric effect, are tentative. They are correct only in that they have never been shown to be wrong and fit a consistent mathematical model. A naturalist expects dropped toast to land on the floor with greater certitude than that it will be butter down. (They actually did experiments to prove that it will be butter side down given the correct parameters of table height, bread size,  and horizontal velocity. Those just happen to match the typical breakfast situation.)

Naturalists, or scientists if you prefer, know no absolutes. Everything that is “known” is based on a solid model, every part of which could be — yet no part of which has been — proven false. We know that electrons tunnel through potential barriers in much the same way that we know that apples will fall downward.

But no one has ever directly observed an electron. We just know how they behave by the effects they have on other things. We know that they are neither solid objects, nor continuous waves. But they affect other things in both of these ways. As a result, we now use devices every day that rely on predictable quantum tunneling. In fact, these devices test this theory over 2,000,000,000 times a second in 2,000,000,000 simultaneous locations. And that’s just the device you’re using to read this (2GHz CPU by 2GB RAM). If it was slightly wrong only once in every 4,000,000,000,000,000,000 times, your machine would crash every second.

But the electron is just a theory. Still, Karl disrespects the confidence that Naturalists have in their methodology.

Likewise, no one has directly observed more obscure particles such as quarks. Yet their behavior is as well documented as that of electrons. We understand nuclear decay fairly well. Yet no one has directly observed a down quark become an up quark (neutron decay, beta emission). But it has been carefully studied for almost a century, and the behavior is well known. Anyone wishing to find a flaw in the theory is welcome to try, and claim a Nobel Prize in the process. That neutrino flux may affect weak-interaction decay rates on Earth on the order of a percent is a recent and still unconfirmed observation. Exciting news that may help us better calibrate instruments based on the theory.

Meanwhile, radiological dating gets more and more corroboration between methods and among other methods. Carbon-14 dating is mostly useful and well calibrated over the span of human history (about 10,000 years). It correlates well with historical records, dendrochronology, thermoluminescence, amino acid racimization, magneto-orientation, and other methods that overlap with it and extend the range.

If the theory behind any dating technique is wrong, it will be discovered. That is the article of faith Naturalists hold as true. As a corollary, any change to the theory is likely to be incremental rather than revolutionary; given the vast store of evidence currently supporting it.

As with changes to all scientific theories, Mathematician Piet Hein said it best:

The Road to Wisdom?
Well, it’s Plain And Simple to Express:
Err
and err
and err again,
But less
and less
and less.

The next time you hear people arguing about nature versus nurture in the area of neuroscience, tell them to cut it out.  Nature versus nurture is no longer a meaningful debate, according to Mriganka Sur, wriging in the Dec 12, 2008 edition of Science (available online only to subscribers):

Among developmental neuroscientists the debate between nature and nurture has become outmoded. We now know that there is no such thing as a gene that acts in isolation and that every gene needs an environment — whether the environment is the presence of molecules made by other genes, signals generated internally within the developing nervous system, or electrical activity transduced from the external world. Thus, the discussion within the field has moved from nature versus nurture to the integration of nature and nurture and even beyond, to the nature of nurture — which kinds of environmental influences can affect gene expression at specific time points of development.

The December 12, 2008 issue of Science Magazine (online only to subscribers) suggests that creationism is a growing movement in many Islamic countries.

The author, Salaman Hameed, writes that:

The Koranic narrative of creation includes a six day account of creation. The length of each day, however, is not clearly specified. One day has been defined as “a thousand years of what you count” (32:5) or as “a day the measure of which is 50,000 years” (70:4). The resulting ambiguity leaves open the possibility of a very old earth. Indeed, young-Earth creationism is wholly absent in the Muslim world, and the universe billions of years old is commonly accepted. On biological evolution, Islamic scholars and popular writers hold a wide range of opinions that represent a broad spectrum of culture and politics, from secular Turkey to the conservative monarchy of Saudi Arabia and the Muslim diasperas in Europe and in the United States.

Contrary to the scholars and Islamic communities, more than half of the lay population of five of the six listed Islamic countries studied considered that evolution by natural selection “could not possibly be true.” Those anti-evolution countries include Turkey, Indonesia, Pakistan, Malaysia and Egypt. For instance, only 8% of Egyptians give credence to evolution by natural selection. In the sixth listed country, Kazakhstan, evolution well accepted.  A recent survey of 25 Muslim university students from Turkey and Morocco indicated that most of them rejected “macroevolution” and tied it to both atheism and to the impossibility that random mutations could lead to complex species.

This widespread rejection of evolution in many Muslim countries gives rise to a potential solution to the problem of creationism here in the United States.  I suspect that most of our American creationists are highly suspicious, if not hateful, of Muslims. I thus think that our American creationists might go a long way toward rejecting the attitudes and beliefs of Muslims–they will tend to want to do the opposite of what the Muslims are doing. Therefore, let’s start a campaign to put up lots of billboards along the highways prominently indicating that most Muslims reject evolution by natural selection. Let’s see, then, if these billboards have the effect of causing American creationists to those rethink their position so that they “aren’t like Muslims.”  If the campaign is wildly successful, we might even see fundamentalists holding Darwin Appreciation Days at their churches.

P.S.  This post is for all of you American creationists who insist that I pick on you because you are Christians. Not true.  See? I’m picking on the Muslim creationists too.

If you tend to do creative work late at night, this article claims that it’s no coincidence that you are a night owl and that you are creative.  Hmmmm.  I wonder what time of day the testing was done to come up with this data.

This is a cross-post from my personal blog; I’m copying it here for Erich, so he can argue with me.  I’m bored at work; I think an argument would help.