you bear that foolish, ill-spirited bumblers keep moving ahead. It saves you from noticing your own flaws.
Virtue is the means by which
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Tricks of Life
stonesl
by Tia Creighton
I wouldn’t call my dad cheap. He was crafty. With five kids on a teacher’s salary he had to be. I remember going into Macy’s one time with him and my brother Toby to buy Toby a pair of slacks for an upcoming family wedding. Toby picked out a pair that came with a cheap, nearly burlap belt included in the loops. My dad held up the pants, said, “Fine,” then stepped over to the rack of belts for sale. He switched out the gratis belt for a new, black, leather one and took the pants to the counter for purchase. The clerk didn’t catch on that the new belt was not meant as part of the ensemble and rang up the pants. Sure it was shoplifting, but my dad called it “Tricks of Life.” [Read more…]
Obscene Gesture Benefits Economy
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Researchers have discovered that “the global hegemony of American culture and its gestural memes” has made a certain hand signal a no-no everywhere in the world. However, the researchers also calculate that this gesture commonly called “the finger” added more than $200 billion to the world economy over the last decade because “cultural hegemony has the benefit of increasing the efficiency of numerous exchanges.”
In a study published in the scientific journal Implied Outcomes, behavioral linguists Luella Tufts and Margaret Kuneeley and economist Beaufort James found that even in the remotest regions of the planet, “the finger” is now offensive. As recently as the 1990s, this was not the case, their research shows.
A little context: in their highly regarded book, Language Development: Foundations, Processes, and Clinical Applications, Brian B. Schulman and Nina C. Capone detail the acquisition and deployment of communication and communicative memes. One part of non-verbal communication the authors treat is what theorists and clinicians call the emblem gesture. Emblem gestures are signal deployments that, within a culture, mean the same thing to all members of that culture: two common ones are the high five and the thumbs-up.
Schulman and Capone also give this caveat: “Note that in some cases, an emblem gesture can be considered benign in one culture but offensive in another culture.”
The work of Tufts et al. explores what happens when, as a result of cultural homogenization, an emblem gesture becomes universal.
The researchers recruited American tourists or other appropriately Westernized people and sent them into remote areas and documented them using the gesture with indigenous people. [Read more…]
Wayne’s Spontaneous Overflow
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by Tracy Elin
Wayne had never thought to write a poem before. When the impulse struck him in his 77th year, he attributed it to the weakness of aging.
He’d raised three boys without ever writing a poem. He’d outlived his wife by 30 years, managing all the household chores, and never written a poem. He’d worked as a foreman at a mining pit, he’d run his own machine shop, and after the recession of the early ’90s, he’d kept the books for a number of small businesses, and in all that time, he’d never felt the need to put his thoughts into verse.
He’d probably read a poem, though he couldn’t recall a specific one. In the Bible, surely. And people said music lyrics were like poems, and he had always been a fan of the true music of the Appalachian region. He wasn’t likely to encounter a poem in his house; the books were mostly technical manuals from his working days, as well as a single shelfful of westerns he reread from time to time. His wife had read a number of books about glamorous people doing inappropriate things, and those were still around somewhere.
But that day when he noticed the scratch pad near the telephone, Wayne sat down and then tapped the pencil a few times before writing: [Read more…]
The Great Recession Is a Great Reason to Celebrate
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Misunderstanding is the cause of so much pain. We at The Stoneslide Corrective would like to correct one misunderstanding that has become rampant in recent years. We would like to lift this veil of pain. We are nothing if not empathetic.
Since 2007, the unemployment rate has gone from under 5% to 9%. That represents approximately seven million additional people out of work. This is commonly called a “national nightmare” or a “tragedy.” We prefer to see it as a tremendous advance for the cause of liberty. [Read more…]
My mind knows more tricks
stonesl
than I do. Sneaky bastard is always getting me in trouble.
