Mean Phoneme Meme

During a bout of insomnia, I pondered an underrepresented phoneme. I first learned about these essential quanta of spoken words while I was earning my degree in psychology back in the early 1980's, and researching computer speech synthesis for fun. What popped into my head these wee hours was the word, "vacuum". Say it aloud with me, "Vacuum". Listen to yourself say it. Vacuum. Break it down. It starts with the vee, a vocalized eff. Then "a" as in "can". And a full-stop kay. No surprises, so far. Did you just utter "Ee"? As in "Keep"? We will get back to that. Next it depends on your dialect. Maybe you said "oo" as in "broom", or maybe oo-uh as in "you-uns". And end with a nice vocalized "mm". This is the only case that I can think of where a double-U really is. But, what was that in the middle? Ee? Vakeeoom? Part of the institutional mis-education in our country is that even teachers are unaware of a double standard in teaching the relationship between spoken and written English. We have "silent-E" drilled into us... (Digression for mathematician Tom Lehrer's version on The Electric Company) ... but what about all those hidden, non-silent "E"s? They are everywhere in our spoken words, but not in the written ones. Even many words with silent E have unwritten spoken long-E's embedded. Take "lake", for example. Listen to yourself say it. There is no hint of the written E on the end. But in the middle? L-eh-ee-k. Long "A" is really short-E-long-E. Always. (Ah-l-oo-eh-ee-z) Take a cue from "cue". K-ee-oo. Do you, like, like "like"? L-ah-ee-k? So my obscure title simply means that I mean to bring attention to the essential idea of a troublesome yet common (mean, mean) spoken sound. I'm usually easy to amuse, but sleep deprivation stunts my self-censorship.

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But wait, there’s more!

It's black Friday today, and I was somehow reminded of Ron Popeil, of Chop-o-Matic fame, inventor of many well-known household products. He has sold more than a billion dollars worth of rotisseries. I noticed that many of Popeil's infomercials are available on YouTube, including this one featuring his food dehydrator: Popeil, who was quite successful as an inventor, was equally impressive as a marketer. He explains his approach to inventing and marketing here. Tonight it occurred to me that even though I saw Popeil's commercials decades ago, I remembered much of Popeil's shtick. I especially remember the audiences applauding on cue. It was somehow effective even though I knew that these people had been paid to applaud on cue. What I didn't know was how the audience members were paid, and it was not with money, as you'll read here. As you can read in the same article, Popeil is now getting ready to market what he characterizes as his final invention, a deep fryer.

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Hunger and Hypocrisy

Peter Singer offered this challenge in the Oct/Nov issue of Free Inquiry (not available on-line):

Imagine that you are walking through a park past a shallow ornamental pond, and you notice that a child has fallen into that pond and seems to be in danger of drowning. You look around for the parents or the babysitter, but there is no one in sight. What should you do? Obviously, you should rush into the pond and save the life of the child. But wait a minute--you are wearing your most expensive shoes, and you don't have time to kick them off. They will be ruined if you go into the pond with them on. Do your shoes make a difference in your decision? Everyone agrees that they don't. You can't let a pair of shoes mean more than a child's life. So how about giving just the cost of an expensive pair of shoes to an organization that is saving lives in developing countries? I don't think it is any different than saving the child in the shallow pond. Yes, it is different psychologically but not morally. Distance doesn't make someone's life less valuable.
Singer's implicit assumption is that your dollars are fungible. When you spend a dollar on a luxury, it is dollar that you could have spent to save the life of a dying child. In other words, dollars don't come pre-categorized such that some dollars can only be spent on luxuries. You cannot escape this logic. Therefore, If Jesus (or whatever God you might believe in) were watching, you closely, and you knew it, you couldn't possibly pay $300 for a pair of shoes when perfectly adequate $100 shoes were also available and when you knew (as you always do know) that the other $200 could be used to save the lives of innocent children. I get frustrated with those who think that the commandment "Do not kill" is not being violated by those who spend excessive money on fancy clothes, cars or houses (or buy any luxury) in the same world where children are dying every day and those deaths are preventable. That said, I don't think that "Do not kill" is a workable rule. It rings nicely to simple ears because it is phrased uncategorically, but we really need a new rule that recognizes that we are not exactly a nation of murderers when we buy a steady stream of unnecessary luxuries (especially at Christmas time), but it's something like that when we completely unhinge our consciences from our wallets, which so many of us in sanctimonious American do almost every day. I don't really know how to articulate such a rule, but I do want to take this moment to recognize this undeniable fact as part of my "Life is Real" campaign: Every day, most of us in American choose to buy things with dollars that could be used for saving the lives of real children. That's the way things are down here on planet Earth, and going around claiming that "Do not kill" only means don't shoot or stab innocent people doesn't change things one bit.

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Matt Taibbi discusses how the media makes and breaks politicians

Yes, the media makes and breaks politicians. They tell us who the "serious" politicians are before the race has even begun, and it always seems to be about who can raise money. At his blog, Matt Taibbi writes thoughtfully about this issue of the way the media caricatures politicians:

The political media has always taken it upon itself to make decisions about who is and who is not qualified to be taken seriously as candidates for higher office. Without even talking about whether they do this more or less to Republicans or Democrats, I can testify that I witnessed this phenomenon over and over again in the primary battles within the Democratic Party. It has always been true that the press corps has drawn upon internalized professional biases, high-school-style groupthink and the urging of insider wonks to separate candidates into “serious” and “unserious” groups before the shots even start to be fired.
Taibbi's post then morphs into some observations about Sarah Palin, who has constantly complained that she is not being treated fairly by "the liberal press."

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Life is real

After a business meeting in Boston last week, I had two extra hours before I needed to head to the airport. I decided to visit a few historical sites on foot by following Boston’s “Freedom Trail.” At one end of the trail is the “Old North Church,” from which the patriots displayed two lanterns to give warning that the British were about to attack “by sea.” As I was approaching the Old North Church, I had an odd thought: The Old North Church really exists. It’s not just part of a concocted story like Harry Potter. You can walk up and touch the bricks and feel the history in your fingertips. You can trace the history of the church through hundreds of authentic letters and other writings. You can say with great confidence that the Old North Church played a real-life role the Revolutionary War. Because I am a lawyer and a writer, I spend a lot of time thinking of abstract ideas. For that reason, I often need to remind myself about some of the many parts of life that really happened. Maybe I also need to remind myself that some things are really real because entertainment has become such a central part of our lives. When Americans get together, they often bond by discussing television shows and movies. These works of fictions are so often discussed that they seem to rise to the level of "facts." But our world mostly depends on real events that dramatically affect our lives. On the flight back home from Boston, I started thinking of some of the other amazing things that actually play critical roles in our lives. They aren’t just stories in history books or science books. For instance, World War II really occurred. It wasn’t just a movie. There are cemeteries filled with the bodies of the soldiers that died in that war. Consider also, the importance of large-scale immigration to the United States over the past centuries. Without that mass movement of people to the United States, most of us wouldn’t have been born. The scale and the details of many real life events are more amazing than anything any fiction writer could conjure up. Here are some other important facts that I am generally amazed at whenever I take the time to remind myself that these aren't simply stories: * The Greeks really built an extraordinary civilization, as did the Maya and the Egyptian. These aren't just yarns spun by museums and authors. * We’re floating in space and there are stars under our feet too. * The sun is a giant furnace that really does light and heat the earth, and someday the sun won’t exist. * The universe is expanding in rapidly in such a way as to suggest a Big Bang, which was a time when there was no Earth and no living things. * Human beings are animals, and we run in large flocks. 40% of our DNA matches the DNA of lettuce. * All living things are related. * We don’t have any credible users’ manual for living life on earth. * We are far from rational beings. * Despite its unfathomable complexity, including the fact that it is constituted of many billions of cells, the human body works. * Almost all human cognition is subconscious and it is driven largely by emotions, addictions and instincts. * There really are 7 billion people on our planet and we are rapidly exhausting the planet’s resources. I often need to remind myself of these things. I get too distracted by day-to-day aspects of my life, which causes me to take all too many things for granted. Thus, I need to remind myself that much of the world around us is really real, not just a story. This is almost embarrassing to admit, but I often enrich my life by consciously acknowledging the obvious.

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