communication. community. cognition.
Travel has downsides (unrelated to being stranded with bronchitis in a motel room in an unfamiliar town…)
My wife has informed me that my two-year-old son is now telling knock-knock jokes. I’m told that I am not missing anything yet, as the jokes do not in fact make sense, but there is a larger issue afoot about the role of syntax and learning abstractions. I’ve discovered that in my country abstract thinking, at its core, is fruity.
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At least for me. I’ve been sick the bulk of my time here, and getting some things done from my room. But the coughing is getting worse, and I now have a headache. The nurses are coming to take me to an emergency room.
Update to come…
Update: 2:46 pm
Back in the room, using the coffeemaker to heat up the water to put in my Ramen cup…
As expected, I now have an antibiotic, a decongestant, and a cough medicine strong enough to put me down for a little bit. Thanks to everyone for the calls and well-wishes. Good news coming tomorrow, I promise…
Update #2: 9:59pm
I really need to take a hot bath, but there’s a break in a main up the street and I have no running water.
Posting may be a little slow for a while.
I’m currently in Muskogee, Oklahoma, working on a disaster assignment for the American Red Cross. We’re helping sustain sheltering and meals for a wide swath of Eastern Oklahoma, where winter storms have knocked out power for days now.
The power is nearly back on — but another storm is blowing in as I write this.
I may be slow to post here, but I am still blogging, technically. We’ve set up a WordPress page (without comments) as a Media Alert center. We’ll use this venue to push updates, alerts, announcements, and news releases. (Just in case those aren’t all just flavors of the same thing.)
Words are powerful little packages. We take them for granted, and don’t always consider all of the hidden meanings behind the words we choose. However, we too often look at the written word, and ignore the sounds of the same word as an utterance. Only then do you appreciate the rhymes, the meter, and the possibilities of mistaken pronunciations.
How much of what we call “lateral thinking” — the joining of previously non-adjacent concepts — is really the product of a pun or a bad translation? And how many words or concepts do we take for granted, even though they were steeped in mistake?
For my first example, I take you all the way back to the Fiesta Bowl, where Boise State knocked off the Oklahoma Sooners. [Read more...]
Deep thinks. Hurt brain. So now for something simple.
I just want to wish a “Happy Otherversary” to my wife, Brenda. We met on the evening of January 10th, 1998, at an office Christmas Holiday party.
Yes, the party was late by a good three weeks or so. Our party planners didn’t get the funding approved until after all of the suitable venues were booked, so we had the party on January 10th. (We weren’t the only ones. Another television station in town had its Holiday Party that same night.)
So… how exactly do you meet a co-worker at an office party?
