New Addition

It has become necessary to update our profile due to expansion.

We now have SEVEN grandchildren.

Congrats to the new parents and welcome to our newest family member.

Malinda, the Entrepreneur

I was thinking about all the small stores in Peru.  There were a couple of them on every block.  They would turn the family garage into a 7-11.  You could buy soda pop, candy bars, soap, toothpaste, toilet paper, bread, cheap toys…maybe 200 SKUs in all.  And no computer or even cash register to keep track of things.  The employees were mom and the older children.

Then I got to thinking that my Grandmother Esplin had a similar set-up.  As a young widow with five children in the early 1930s, she needed to do something to provide for herself.  Here’s the story as told by her daughter Cleone:

Mamma had a route of Glendale, Orderville and Mt. Carmel (about seven miles from one end to the other) where she and us girls would go to the homes and take orders for hosiery of all kinds, and some spices and flavorings.  Excelsis products they were called.  We would walk to the town in the morning, take the orders, and walk back home in the afternoon, always sure to be home before dark  We never just one went.  Much of the time Velna and I would go.

This brought in a little income, so Mamma decided to try setting up a little store with hosiery, Excelsis products, and a line of five-and-ten-cent jewelry.  Aunt Anne’s brother, Bill Turcsansci, was a manager in the Salt Lake City Kress’ store.  He would pick out a good selection of jewelry items that would sell in Orderville, send them via parcel post, and she would mail him the check when the items and bill arrived.

This worked out very well for quite some time, and we were able to sell lots of the fun things that you normally had to go to Salt Lake City for.

Now, for the remodeling of the once-kitchen for the five and dime store.  I think Mamma and Uncle Howdy did the work.  It was nothing fancy, just a new coat of paint, some wide lumber shelves, a little counter for wrapping or bagging some items.  Mamma had it organized neatly and kept it clean.  I don’t remember tending the store much.  There wasn’t that much business, and Mamma was home much of the time and would hear the door open if she was in another room.

All the girls in town were steady customers.  They loved to get the Kress’ of Salt Lake jewelry.

(from Cleone’s Life Story, by Cleone Esplin Judd, December 25, 2009)

Is a Righteous Man Electable?

I recently read a 1999 book by S. Michael Wilcox called, "A Nation at the Crossroads: Spiritual Decline in the Promised Land."
He analyzes the scriptural record of fallen civilizations and determines that they provide warning signs to us regarding wickedness.  They are:

• Violence
• Secret Combinations
• Lack of civilized behavior
• Perversion of procreation
• Fascination with evil
• Materialism
• Militarism
• Oppression of the poor
• Failure to protect women and orphans
• Rejection of values and absolute truths

That's a pretty good list.  And it frightens me to see all of them alive and well in our society today.

But it got me thinking about what our electorate would do if a righteous man were to actively campaign for president.  I think Romney holds back on any talk of the very things that will save our nation.  Things like prayer, fasting, worship, obedience to the commandments.

Obviously it isn't good politics to do too much preaching, but that's exactly what a righteous man would do.

We haven't seen that kind of talk since Eisenhower.

Sure, when there is a tragedy, the president says, "Our hearts and prayers go out to the families....blah blah blah."  But that always sounds more like a trite phrase than a call to kneel down.

I blame the media for their attacks on religious remarks.  I honestly believe there are large numbers of religious people who are afraid to speak up.  It seems somehow impolite to talk freely about religious beliefs these days.

Religion is a negative in campaigning these days.  But righteousness is exactly what we need in our candidates.  And a bold call for return to God.  But such a move would lose the election.  We can't get the very thing we really need.

Stuff that works

Here's to a great idea.
WD40 with a built-in straw.  All you do is flip it up into place and spray away.
No more straws taped to the side of the can.
Kudos to the engineers who came up with that one.

Beyond Stuart Little

E. B. White wrote Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web...and updated The Elements of Style.
This morning I came across an essay he wrote in 1940.  It seems that some of the sophisticated folks of the day were throwing America's ways under the bus in favor of Fascism.  (Although we aren't embracing Hitler these days it isn't hard to find folks out there who would endorse Islam over Christianity or the 99% over free market capitalism.)
So I think what White has to say here has a timely message today.

Freedom

by E B White – 1940

I have often noticed on my trips up to the city that people have recut their clothes to follow the fashion. On my last trip, however, it seemed to me that people had remodeled their ideas too－taken in their convictions a little at the waist, shortened the sleeves of their resolve, and fitted themselves out in a new intellectual ensemble copied from a smart design out of the very latest page of history. It seemed to me they had strung along with Paris a little too long.

I confess to a disturbed stomach. I feel sick when I find anyone adjusting his mind to the new tyranny which is succeeding abroad. Because of its fundamental strictures, fascism does not seem to me to admit of any compromise or any rationalization, and I resent the patronizing air of persons who find in my plain belief in freedom a sign of immaturity. If it is boyish to believe that a human being should live free, then I'll gladly arrest my development and let the rest of the world grow up.

I shall report some of the strange remarks I heard in New York. One man told me that he thought perhaps the Nazi ideal was a sounder ideal than our constitutional system "because have you ever noticed what fine alert young faces the young German soldiers have in the newsreel? " He added: "Our American youngsters spend all their time at the movies－ they're a mess." That was his summation of the case, his interpretation of the new Europe. Such a remark leaves me pale and shaken. If it represents the peak of our intelligence, then the steady march of despotism will not receive any considerable setback at our shores.

Another man informed me that our democratic notion of popular government was decadent and not worth bothering about－ "because England is really rotten and the industrial towns there are a disgrace." That was the only reason he gave for the hopelessness of democracy; and he seemed mightily pleased with himself, as though he were more familiar than most with the anatomy of decadence, and had detected subtler aspects of the situation than were discernible to the rest of us.

Another man assured me that anyone who took any kind of government seriously was a gullible fool. You could be sure, he said, that there is nothing but corruption "because of the way Clemenceau acted at Versailles." He said itdidn't make any difference really about this war. It was just another war. Having relieved himself of this majestic bit of reasoning, he subsided.

Another individual, discovering signs of zeal creeping into my blood, berated me for having lost my detachment, my pure skeptical point of view. He announced that he wasn't going to be swept away by all this nonsense, but would prefer to remain in the role of innocent by stander, which he said was the duty of any intelligent person. (I noticed, that he phoned later to qualify his remark, as though he had lost some of his innocence in the cab on the way home. )

Those are just a few samples of the sort of talk that seemed to be going round－ talk which was full of defeatism and disillusion and sometimes of a too studied innocence. Men are not merely annihilating themselves at a great rate these days, but they are telling one another enormous lies, grandiose fibs. Such remarks as I heard are fearfully disturbing in their cumulative effect. They are more destructive than dive bombers and mine fields, for they challenge not merely one's immediate position but one's main defenses. They seemed to me to issue either from persons who could never have really come to grips with freedom so as to understand her, or from renegades. Where I expected to find indignation, I found paralysis, or a sort of dim acquiescence, as in a child who is duly swallowing a distasteful pill. I was advised of the growing anti-Jewish sentiment by a man who seemed to be watching the phenomenon of intolerance not through tears of shame but with a clear intellectual gaze, as through a well-ground lens.

The least a man can do at such a time is to declare himself and tell where he stands. I believe in freedom with the same burning delight, the same faith, the same intense abandon which attended its birth on this continent more than a century and a half ago. I am writing my declaration rapidly, much as though I were shaving to catch a train. Events abroad give a man a feeling of being pressed for time. Actually I do not believe I am pressed for time, and I apologize to the reader for a false impression that may be created. I just want to tell, before I get slowed down, that I am in love with freedom and that it is an affair of long standing and that it is a fine state to be in, and that I am deeply suspicious of people who are beginning to adjust to fascism and dictators merely because they are succeeding in war. From such adaptable natures a smell rises. I pinch my nose.

For as long as I can remember I have had a sense of living somewhat freely in a natural world. I don't mean I enjoyed freedom of action, but my existence seemed to have the quality of freeness. I traveled with secret papers pertaining to a divine conspiracy. Intuitively I've always been aware of the vitally important pact which a man has with himself, to be all things to himself, and to be identified with all things, to stand self-reliant, taking advantage of his haphazard connection with a planet, riding his luck, and following his bent with the tenacity of a hound. My first and greatest love affair was with this thing we call freedom, this lady of infinite allure, this dangerous and beautiful and sublime being who restores and supplies us all.

It began with the haunting intimation (which I presume every child receives) of his mystical inner life; of God in man; of nature publishing herself through the "I." This elusive sensation is moving and memorable. It comes early in life: a boy, we'll say, sitting on the front stepson a summer night, thinking of nothing in particular, suddenly hearing as with a new perception and as though for the first time the pulsing sound of crickets, overwhelmed with the novel sense of identification with the natural company of insects and grass and night, conscious of a faint answering cry to the universal perplexing question: "What is I'?" Or a little girl, returning from the grave of a pet bird leaning with her elbows on the window sill, inhaling the unfamiliar draught of death, suddenly seeing herself as part of the complete story. Or to an older youth, encountering for the first time a great teacher who by some chance word or mood awakens something and the youth beginning to breathe as an individual and conscious of strength in his vitals. I think the sensation must develop in many men as a feeling of identity with God－ an eruption of the spirit caused by allergies and the sense of divine existence as distinct from mere animal existence. This is the beginning of the affair with freedom.

But a man's free condition is of two parts: the instinctive freeness he experiences as an animal dweller on a planet, and the practical liberties he enjoys as a privileged member of human society. The latter is, of the two, more generally understood, more widely admired, more violently challenged and discussed. It is the practical and apparent side of freedom. The United States, almost alone today, offers the liberties and the privileges and the tools of freedom. In this land the citizens are still invited to write plays and books, to paint their pictures, to meet for discussion, to dissent as well as to agree, to mount soapboxes in the public square, to enjoy education in all subjects without censorship, to hold court and judge one another, to compose music, to talk politics with their neighbors without wondering whether the secret police are listening, to exchange ideas as well as goods, to kid the government when it needs kidding, and to read real news of real events instead of phony news manufactured by a paid agent of the state. This is a fact and should give every person pause.

To be free, in a planetary sense, is to feel that you belong to earth. To be free, in a social sense, is to feel at home in a democratic framework. In Adolph Hitler, although he is a freely flowering individual, we do not detect either type of sensibility. From reading his book I gather that his feeling for earth is not a sense of communion but a driving urge to prevail. His feeling for men is not that they co-exist, but that they are capable of being arranged and standardized by a superior intellect－ that their existence suggests not a fulfillment of their personalities but a submersion of their personalities in the common racial destiny. His very great absorption in the destiny of the German people somehow loses some of its effect when you discover, from his writings, in what vast contempt he holds all people. "I learned," he wrote, ". . . to gain an insight into the unbelievably primitive opinions and arguments of the people." To him the ordinary man is a primitive, capable only of being used and led. He speaks continually of people as sheep, halfwits, and impudent fools－ the same people from whom he asks the utmost in loyalty, and to whom he promises the ultimate in prizes.

Here in America, where our society is based on belief in the individual, not contempt for him, the free principle of life has a chance of surviving. I believe that it must and will survive. To understand freedom is an accomplishment which all men may acquire who set their minds in that direction; and to love freedom is a tendency which many Americans are born with. To live in the same room with freedom, or in the same hemisphere, is still a profoundly shaking experience for me.

One of the earliest truths (and to him most valuable) that the author of Mein Kampf discovered was that it is not the written word, but the spoken word, which in heated moments moves great masses of people to noble or ignoble action. The written word, unlike the spoken word, is something which every person examines privately and judges calmly by his own intellectual standards, not by what the man standing next to him thinks. "I know," wrote Hitler, "that one is able to win people far more by the spoken than by the written word...." Later he adds contemptuously: "For let it be said to all knights of the pen and to all the political dandies, especially of today: the greatest changes in this world have never been brought about by a goose quill! No, the pen has always been reserved to motivate these changes theoretically."

Luckily I am not out to change the world－ that's being done for me, and at a great clip. But I know that the free spirit of man is persistent in nature; it recurs, and has never successfully been wiped out, by fire or flood. I set down the above remarks merely (in the words of Mr. Hitler) to motivate that spirit, theoretically. Being myself a knight of the goose quill, I am under no misapprehension about "winning people"; but I am inordinately proud these days of the quill, for it has shown itself, historically, to be the hypodermic which inoculates men and keeps the germ of freedom always in circulation, so that there are individuals in every time in every land who are the carriers, the Typhoid Marys, capable of infecting others by mere contact and example. These persons are feared by every tyrant－ who shows his fear by burning the books and destroying the individuals. A writer goes about his task today with the extra satisfaction which comes from knowing that he will be the first to have his head lopped off－ even before the political dandies. In my own case this is a double satisfaction, for if freedom were denied me by force of earthly circumstance, I am the same as dead and would infinitely prefer to go into fascism without my head than with it, having no use for it any more and not wishing to be saddled with so heavy

The Lobe on the Left

As family members go to work every day (or try to) it brings to mind the struggles we have with coworkers and managers.  Consultants have made lots of money helping companies identify the characteristics of workers (“Four Quadrant,” for example) in order to boost productivity.

The idea is that you have different methods of communication depending on the personality of a coworker.

Some companies have gone to the extreme of putting symbols on the nameplates of office doors and cubicles announcing the traits of the employee.

Key to understanding is the concept that those who are left-brain dominant are prone to be more logical and methodical.  The left-brain has even been associated with things like OCD and autism.

Gender theory since the feminist revolution suggests that girls have traditionally been slaves to the right brain.  Educators have sought to increase the exposure of teen girls to math and science in an effort to build left-brain thinking.  If successful, a balanced brain can be very effective.  The combination of logic and nuance is powerful indeed.

I’ve worked for years among technicians and engineers, and have learned a thing or two about left-brain dominant people.  Those who use the left side of the brain for a living are a different breed from the artists and salesmen of society.

Here are some random thoughts on the subject.

• Well, they don’t like…random.
• They prefer an elegant solution to a kludge.  Loose ends and afterthoughts bother them.
• They are a sarcastic (even sardonic) lot.
• They like music, especially if it has structure.  I know a physics professor who is an accomplished pianist.  He enjoys the math involved.  For example, each measure is a balanced equation of time.  The octaves are also mathematical.  Cheating either and making it work is a challenge he enjoys.
• They like to pigeonhole the elements of their life by applying labels to people.  Liberal-conservative-smart-dull-hyper-morose-religeous-agnostic-shrewd-gullible…That makes them rather judgmental.
• They don’t much like government.  There are several reasons for this.  First, they despise the lack of control.  Someone else is in authority over them and telling them what to do.  And these people in charge are fools.  They don’t like being played by politicians and they can spot the plays right away.  They wonder, “Why can’t people see that this fool is making empty promises just to get their votes?”  And the propaganda is irritating.
• Related to the lack of control, they don’t make very good passengers.  Some of them even refuse to fly because someone else is in control of their lives behind that cockpit door.  The mystery of a stranger in charge is too much for them to take.  Besides, they can’t even see out the windshield.
• The left-brained is prone to think, “I know more than you do,” but he will never say it.
• They are not above dumpster-diving.  If something has usefulness, why not use it?
• They tend to be pack rats.
• They think ahead in everything from chess to laundry.  Always.
• They enjoy games with a challenge to them.
• When it comes to relationships they are loyal to a fault.  But they do not care for high-maintenance types.
• They have a keen sense of humor that is often missed.
• When it comes to working with them, they enjoy structure and well-defined tasks and goals.  They don’t need to be told every step of a project, but they do need to understand the purpose and the desired result.  Projects that are vague and follow a twisting path are not at all appreciated.  And they don’t like painting rocks.  Make-work projects are quickly seen for what they are.

Fortunately, there are few people who are so left-dominant that they don’t venture over to the wild side now and then.  Most of them use the right side rather frequently.

There is an interesting case from Utah regarding a man with complete separation between left and right.  His name is Kim Peek who died in 2009 at the age of 58.  He was a fascinating mind who could read both pages of an open book simultaneously.  (Kindle in stereo, anyone?)

Below are some illustrations of the concept.

 This one's more a battle-of-the-sexes thing, but it has to do with the same subject: