Overflow

An editorial note: All of the future-geeky stuff I’ve been putting here will now start going over to the blog called Futurescan, a group effort of the folks associated with the UHCL futures studies progam.

This will leave Overflow to just be my own personal repository for thoughts, work and other things that catch my fancy.

This is an interesting article on the nature of housekeeping and homemaking, highlighting the growing industry surrounding “clutter control” and “simplicity”.

I agree wholeheartedly with the author’s observation that the bulk of the so-called “simplicity” movement (a la glossy mags like Real Simple) is just a veiled marketing effort to get us to spend money to satisfy our unrequited yearning for a simple life. Read this article and then go do some real housekeeping. To simplify, you actually have to toss stuff, not buy more stuff…

In fact, we’re having a garage sale tomorrow, trying to get rid of the effluvia and detritus left after merging two households into one home. (We only need one lawnmower, one edger, and no more than, say, three hammers.)

Last Saturday was spent cleaning up the garage in the new house, going through boxes of my in-laws’ life and determining what to keep, sell, or throw away. Whoever packed the boxes made the task as difficult as possible with every box having a mix of trash, broken items, duplicate housewares, and priceless antiques and irreplaceable memorabilia. What’s more, some of the broken items were irreplaceable antiques awaiting repair. It was excruciating, but Heidi and I finally got through it. The garage has now joined the rest of the new house in being a Useful Living Space instead of being just a repository of stuff.

I can see a darn fine workshop emerging — my inlaws have a spectacular collection of tools leftover from a lifetime of contracting — and it’s starting to spark my creative juices. I just have to get past this garage sale and the sale of my old home.

Heh, at this garage sale, the garage will actually be for sale. Wanna buy a tiny but well-loved three bedroom house in Houston?

From the Future Geek Archives: Parsing Predictions: code-based theory building for futures research

Another article to digest later: An emerging Catholic worldview informed by ideas from postmodern science.

Another one of those links I don’t have time to digest but don’t want to lose. A “postmodern strategy of regeneration” for the Catholic church. Themes for possible futures of the Church called From Industrial Revolution to Electronic Revolution: The Postmodern Challenge to Catholic Social Thought in the Catholic University by Joe Holland, Ph.D.

We have this new little baby. Well, not so new because we’ve had her for four weeks. (I know, but this is not a real diary, is it?) Anyway, I was looking for a screen name for her right from the start because you really shouldn’t use these foster kids’ real names on the Internet.

Anyway, she looked like a “Petunia” to me at first. But, thanks to recent digestive conditions, another nickname has kind of stuck — “Pebbles.” In the unlikely case that you want to know, this comes from the form of her baby formula once she is done with it, so to speak.

Mr. Freshpants got his name by the refreshed, almost perky demeanor he always had after a diaper change. Hey, we all like a nice clean pair of underpants, right?

An interesting concept — giving ourselves nicknames that apply to us only during certain states of being — could catch on.

Our daughter has nicknames along the same lines.. GirlZilla, Judy Moody, Miss Thang, Blonde Tornado, Gooberhead (sometimes shared by me and Mr. Freshpants as decided by my wife).

Another promising lead in the fight against obesity. I am all for a safe, effective remedy for obesity, given that I am a sufferer, but I doubt a pill would do the trick completely. There would have to be some behavior change to actually lose weight.

Way back I tried phen-fen and was struck by one thing (Besides the news that it might kill me of course. I got off right away) — I got a glimpse of what it felt like to have a “normal” appetite. The serving sizes on the container really were enough. Who’d've thunk? With this little pill, my brain was fooled into thinking skinny, and it was an eye opener for sure. Too bad I was not able to accomplish at the cognitive level what the wonderful but dangerous fen was able to do for me at the neurotransmitter level.

Yes, I believe sensible diet and exercise is the only real way to lose weight. I believe that the key to weight loss is mostly behavioral. But I also believe that a part of the formula — the biological conditions that determine the amount of “will power” required to accomplish such a program — is determined in our genes. Some people do have it easier than others.

I don’t want a pill that will make me thin. But I do want a pill that will level the playing field — giving me the “skinny brain” effect that will make it as easy for me to pass up food as it is for all you skinny folk out there.
Yes, I’m jealous.

While I’m on Suburbia, I’ll dig from the archives a paean in Salon to the new suburban pinup girls — Saucy soccer moms. I couldn’t agree more with this guy, especially given that I’ve bagged one of these for myself. Yessiree, I’m a lucky guy.

I wouldn’t think that David Brooks, who brought us the term “Bobo” to categorize and cut down to size our current cultural elite, would have too much good to say about suburban culture in America. Well, I was wrong. His essay in the Atlantic Online is a gratifying read, and a bit of a comeuppance for me, a born-and-bred suburbanite who at times is pretentiously disdainful of all things ‘burban.

Of course, Brooks can’t resist a wink to the standard critics of suburban commercial blandness that passes for culture:

“here and there you see little ribbons of green fairways, with country-club communities clustered around them like reeds around ponds-tile-roofed McMansions with mouse-pad lawns and little blue dots where the backyard spas are. Along the nearby roadways you can see massive two-tier malls. In the front tier are strings of chain restaurants that, if they merged, could form Chili’s Olive Garden Outback Cantina, serving enough chicken wings to fill a canyon. In the back tier a line of megastores stretches out like a parade of pachyderms: Target, Petsmart, OfficeMax, Lowe’s, and Barnes & Noble. Cutting diagonally across the empty parking spaces in between are ninety-eight-pound women in aerobics outfits steering 4,000-pound SUVs (these days, the smaller the woman, the bigger the car). If a modern Pied Piper came down to round up all the kids, it would be called The Gathering of Ashleys, and hundreds of cheerful ten-year-old girls would pour out of the Gaps and Abercrombies and Wal-Marts, drawn by the piping of Britney Spears. They’d have their peach tank tops, their 2 Grrrls brand strawberry-scented spritz, and their pink backpacks, and they’d be led, mesmerized, to soccer practice.”

But his thesis is a positive one:

“America is perpetually on the brink of being corrupted by its own affluence-but only on the brink. We are less shallow than we appear. If you fly over Scottsdale, Arizona, you fly over homes owned by people who slogged their way through medical school and ER duty, or negotiated the booms and crashes of the high-tech industry, or handled a management team or a lifetime of divorce cases. They look stupid puttering around the fairways in their golf shorts, but they usually have something interesting to tell about their pasts. If we could understand how the lives they have lived have inculcated the virtues we admire, I think we would begin to appreciate that this nation has achieved a paradoxical and inexplicable condition: suburban greatness.”