I can empathize.

Dear Blog Readers

I hope that this finds you doing well. I am fine. Vacation is over. I have spent the week being reintegrated back into society and life. It was a great week of vacation. While great, it was not easy. I don’t do nothing well. Hence, you were treated to 5 blogs in a week; places to go and ideas to exploit. There are a couple of lingering ideas to look at, turn over and explore.

First off Amy Baker, agent provocateur extraordinary, gave the following suggestion for a blog topic in response to my request for suggestions. I like to get these suggestions from time to time to see if I can write something on the spur of the moment. Usually I ruminate on two or three topics at a time and write bits and pieces in my mind for a week before the process of “writing the blog” commences. When it comes time to write, I sit down and start stitching the pieces together. Amy’s suggestion? “If Google Glass really does build empathy, who would you give the glass to and why?”

Let’s set that aside for a second because there are things to discuss about a vacation in the Adirondacks. As we were leaving, our Subaru Forrester was spied upon by no fewer than 5 Assassin deer lurking at the edge of the woods during the twilight of the day. We found out that they were obviously reporting our course to a couple of suicide sprinters in Western New York. Armed with our position and our travel plans, the two bambi jihadists sprinted out in front of us while traveling at speeds in excess of 75 mph in moderate interstate traffic. After a serious brake press, serious cursing, and bracing for airbag deployment, they were unsuccessful. The one suicide runner passed 10 ft in front of us and his cohort passed immediately behind us. We were very fortunate.

Any blog about the Adirondacks during the summer time has to include a shout out to the black fly. This scourge of the northern tier of states has to be commented on. I had never had the pleasure. 6 hours after our first outdoor encounter, I realized that had nearly 20 bites on my arms and legs. I noticed that I had these hard bumps every where. I had not even realized that there was a problem. Fearing that these bumps were filled with parasitic offspring like the chiggers that inhabit our Hoosier environs, I went to the web to find our more. I found that there are 1800 species of which 20 have become extinct. To which, I suggest that scientists work harder.

These are a very nasty pest. When they start to bite you they inject you with a “powerful anticoagulant” that doubles as a numbing agent. So you don’t feel like you are getting bitten. You are completely passive as they drain your blood. The problem is so bad that in Canada, where infestations are especially high, cattle have been killed by black flies. No, they don’t coordinate their activities and all bite the cow at the same time and with the coordinated effort of millions of tiny pairs of wings lift the cow up to a staggering height and then terminate said cow by dropping them into a pond. No it is literally death by a thousand cuts. These tiny insects take so much blood that in extreme cases the cows are weakened to the point that they succumbed to their wounds.

The Adirondack people; the locals, not the tourists are a stout people. They fight the black flies in the summer and the winters are from another planet. Last winter, remember those winter vortices in central Indiana, in the Adirondacks they sent the frost level down 58 inches. I don’t know who dug down that deep to figure it out the correct depth.

That is cold. The entire landscape is built on old granite and yet trees are growing everywhere. This means that nature grabbed hold of those rocks with lichen griping deep in the cracks killing those rocks with a thousand cuts. Through the millennia, the lichen were followed by weeds, then trees; each leaving its residue building upon those who came before until today there are probably 2 feet of top soil leaving a blanket of forest. Each tree further blocking out views of the weather that Hoosiers can see from 10 miles away. One gets a sense that Adirondackers are a people on the edge. They can fight the flies, the forest, and the weather. However, the power that overwhelms them is located 160 miles away in Albany. Over the years, representatives of the masses, living in sterile concrete and asphalt jungles, have gained control of the property rights of much of the Adirondack Park and now all of those trees that could support the livelihood of the residents in the area are off limits. A good comparison would be keeping politicians from using donor money during elections and telling them that it is for the good of the world that the politicians suffer a little.

All of this brings me back to Amy’s question. “If Google Glass really does build empathy, who would you give the glass to and why? After all, one should have empathy for the Adirondackians. The question was inspired by a TED talk by Chris Kluwe. The title is How Augmented Reality Will Change Sports . . . Build Empathy. http://www.ted.com/.../chris_kluwe_how_augmented_reality... I must admit that it is the first TED talk that I have listened to. I am skeptical. I like my intellectual stimulation to come in bigger than 15 minute chunks by ex-NFL punters. What credentials does an ex-NFL punter have speak about Virtual Reality or Augmented Reality; other than having an in with Google so that he can wear Google Glass for his presentation?

Mr. Kluwe’s premise is that augmented reality will allow stupid players with tons of physical abilities will be able to play as well as smart players with less physical ability. In other words with augmented reality, Brett Farve would have thrown fewer interceptions. By using cameras, huge computer arrays, and heads up displays in player’s helmets, the geeks will be able to analyze the field and flash the open area where the quarterback should throw the ball and simultaneously direct the wide receiver to run to the same spot for the catch.

Then Mr. Kluwe segues to the idea that Google Glass will allow the hordes of people (black flies) to see what others are seeing without leaving their dimly lit computer room. For proof, he shows some kid’s physical reactions to wearing a virtual reality headset watching a roller coaster. From there, he claims that we will have empathy for the bullied because they will be able to show the world what a bullying confrontation looks like or what it feels like to be persecuted as a gay in Ghana or Nigeria. Google Glass will save humanity.

Why will Google Glass connect us more deeply when all previous technology advancement has only connected us shallowly to more people? How can we gain more empathy when we limit the dimensions of human interaction to sight and maybe sound? I thought that video games were desensitizing the youth of America to violence. I bet that if the kid wearing the virtual reality headset were to watch the rollercoaster experience over and over, he would be able to stand up straight with no bobbing and weaving within a week. Sooner or later his other senses would realize that they were being tricked by the eyes and compensate.

Sure with heavy editing and the proper soundtrack, the masses will be moved temporarily with empathy for the victim making society more susceptible to the manipulations of forces outside our communities.  However, that is no substitute to walking a mile in their shoes; to feel, to touch, to live within community takes all of our senses. It takes those other senses to make the lessons stick. One has to sit there with the aftermath of the experience to develop empathy; changing the channel or pulling up the next Youtube video inoculates the watcher against the inner changes that promotes empathy. This mass bombardment and inoculation leaves the watcher believing that a hashtag will actually save 300 young women in Nigeria from a horrible fate.

But I digress, as Amy probably knew that I would. The question before the masses today is “If Google Glass really does build empathy, who would you give the glass to and why?”

I would give it to myself because that would be so cool, and everyone knows that in order to love the world you first have to love yourself.

Take care,

Roger

The Wrong Lesson Well Learned

Dear Blog Reader.

I hope that this finds you doing well. I am fine. I report to you once again from the first day of the rest of my summer vacation. A first day, I might add that has given us 36 straight hours of rain. And if the weather man is to be believed (not that he ever lies), we are in for another 24 hours of rain tomorrow; the first day of our summer vacation.

Not to worry, it is supposed to clear up on Saturday. This is important because the main reason we are in Long Lake is for the wedding of a family friend on Saturday. I know that you are surprised. Based on earlier reports, I can understand that you might believe I came to spend time with the beautiful Miss Beverly, viewing Buttermilk Falls, climbing a bald topped hill, and biking on very hilly terrain. However, utilizing well honed blogging skills, I managed to keep our motives hidden, building the interest until the last moment. Then bang, I whip out the real reason for coming to Long Lake and “wow” you the blog reader.

One good thing about the 36 hours of rain (other than honing already sharp puzzle working skills) is that we do not get to go paddle boarding. For the uninitiated, paddle boarding is not a fraternity prank for future CIA operatives, although water and boards are involved, for that matter drowning could be involved also. No, paddle boarding involves standing up on a plank of buoyant foam filled plastic resins and paddling with a long double bladed paddle. So basically, it is kayaking without the benefits and comfort of sitting down. It is water sport for evangelical Christians. I know I digress but why can’t the evangelicals just sing from a sitting position. I tithe so that the church doesn’t have to scrimp on the padding for the pews. So we get the cushy chairs, and I have to stand up for all of the songs. Why not stand up for the sermon? Keep the minister on his toes; concerned that I may just go ahead and walk out if he gets a bit long winded. Where was I? Oh yeah standing up while paddling across the water. What do we have some sort of Messiah complex? “Look at me. From a distance it looks like I am walking on water.” For 50 years, I was told “don’t stand up in a canoe, the row boat; basically any small human powered water craft.” Officer safety demonstrated that at  the beginning of every camp season. He showed us how easy it was to tip a canoe over by standing up. Now, through the miracle of modern flotation we can stand up on a board that does not even have a keel? I don’t think so.

Which is why, for the record, I do not endorse paddle boarding. I basically have a hate, hate relationship with bodies of water larger than a hot tub. Until I or my offspring develop gills, I will continue to be leery around bodies of water.

I know that my father and my grandmother are to blame. The farm that I grew up on and continue to grow old on has a spring fed gravel pit. The farm North of Ingalls was close to Interstate 69. During its construction, they needed vast amounts of gravel to create the road bed. As the civil engineers started work on each new section they would scour the nearby country side for supplies that were easy to dig and close to the road construction so that trucking costs could be kept down. So during the late 50’s and through the 60’s, several different gravel companies came a calling and dug a big hole 300 yards north of my grandmother’s house. The glaciers were generous and left a very deep and long vein of gravel “just over the hill.” 

I can still remember the huge dragline swinging his bucket out over the hole, letting the cable play out, the weight of the bucket carrying it out and over the pit. The operator through years of practice able to land the 5 yard bucket within inches of its next mouthful of gravel after swinging through a 100 degree arc, 90  feet out in the pit after falling 50 feet. He could do it every time. My dad loved to take us down the hill. They would run long into the night. The smell of the diesel, the roar of the huge engines with the heat warming the cockpit on cold late autumn nights are all memories that flood back to me as bright as the lights that were used to light the entire gravel mining operation.

Like all good things, veins of gravel must come to an end sometime. This one did. 50 feet below the surface of the of the pit’s rim, the excavators hit limestone. It was thick and the bottom of an old crustacean filled lake or pond or ocean or something. Not being geologist, the quarrymen were sure that more gravel lay just beyond the barrier. Filling the bucket with boulders to make it more effective, the crane operator started banging away. Soon the barrier was broken and thousands of gallons of water came pouring into the hole. Within a few days, the water reached the level of the underground cavern that fed the spring; Leaving 20 ft banks on the gravel pit, a good old swimming hole about 30 ft deep, and ancestors who were sure that their scions would wander down over the hill, jump in and surely drown.

In order to keep that eventuality from playing itself out, my father, with the help of successive hired hands commenced operation “scare the B-Jesus out of the little kids.” They made up elaborate stories for gullible six year olds that “those bubbles rising to the surface were from underwater gnomes who had wheelbarrows and were mining rocks and gravel up and down from the bottom of the pond, and if they caught you, they would tie your legs together and drag you down to the deep and horrible crushing depths and you would never be recovered.” Of course, that would never work for middle school kids. So it became the long tendrils of pond weeds that would wrap around your legs if you ever jumped in and keep you from surfacing.

These are lessons that were taken to heart. Taken to heart so strongly in fact that to this day after 52 years, I have never so much as dipped a toe into a great swimming pond just over the hill from my grandmother’s house. Thankfully, I did not transfer the boogie man to my children and the lovely Miss Beverly was able to spend many hours in the gravel pit with them. The gravel is long gone and I have traveled 782 miles to the shore of another lake in which I am not going swimming.

Take care,

Roger.

The Dog Days of Vacation

Dear Blog Reader           

I hope that this finds you doing well. The rains have come to the Adirondacks, and I have finally learned to spell Adirondacks without any red squiggly spell check lines popping up showing me the error of my ways. With the arrival of the rains, the dog days of vacation have also arrived. We are not in Las Vegas, where when the rains comes everyone keeps pulling the one armed bandits and life goes on. Up here in the great outdoors everyone heads inside when the rain comes across the clearing between the woods and the cabin. With the five feet of warning, we headed inside, started to download movies, pull out the books and work on this devilishly difficult puzzle.

During this dearth of activity, I went and did it. I went ahead and signed up for the Ride Across Indiana. I have been toying with the idea since December. Each year since taking up riding 4 years ago, I have been taking on greater and greater challenges; the 4 miles around our country block, a thirty mile bike ride, 380 miles in a week during Cover Indiana for Habitat for Humanity last year, a century ride this past Good Friday, now this; 160 miles across Indiana in one day. 160 miles is a lot harder than 100 miles because the 1^st 100 miles is the easy part. After that, every mile just adds to the pain. I am not sure that I can make it. Being an eldest child “I’m not sure that I can make it” is a great motivator. It usually motivates me to not try. Failure is horrible for me. However, the dog days of vacation have overtaken me. I hit the submit button, parted with my $110 for a bike jersey and entry fee.

Last year, many of you came together to support Habitat for Humanity by pledging money in support of my ride. The RAIN is not a charity ride but that doesn’t mean that we can’t think outside the box and find a way to hook up your generosity with a good cause while I get to ride my bike. So, if you want to sponsor my ride across Indiana, 160 miles in one day, let me know via email rlsharritt@aol.com or Facebook message. We can work out the logistics of collecting your checks and such and get them to the Lafayette, Habitat for Humanity, and getting the receipts back to you for tax purposes. Last year, I provided that following incentive. Everyone who donated $100 could designate the blog theme for a day of the ride. Obviously, I don’t have time to ride 160 miles and write 10 blogs in one day. But I think that I could write a limerick about any topic you choose for a $100.00 donation. So make your pledges. The amounts can be any size and you will receive my undying gratitude. If they are for $100 or more, you need to send the limerick topic. I will be dragging my smart phone along, and all day long I will post limericks on Twitter and Facebook in recognition of your generosity. Don’t wait too long. The ride leaves on July 12^th. If you forget and send your donations after, I will get it to Habitat but I can’t post Tweets in the past; no matter how fast I ride.

Today’s blog topic was provided by the lovely Miss Beverly. It coincides perfectly with the dog days of vacation. Even though it is the 1^st day of the rest of summer vacation, living in the present is very taxing work. I love vacation, but I miss my garden, and my mostly flat 20 mile a day bike ride, and even getting up at 5:00 a.m. for meditation hour. So Wednesday is here and I find myself peaking at tomorrow and the next day and the ride home.

Bev’s topic? How does vacation in black fly country during black fly season remind you of a bible story? It reminds me of Job. After four days swatting these pesky deet drinking flies of death, I feel exactly like Job with those boils that at one point he decided to scrape with shards of a jar while his holier than thou friends failed at friendship.

For a couple of weeks early in the summer these small black flies emerge in hoards in upstate New York. I mean literally gazillions. At one point walking down a forest path, I looked down and could not see my tennis shoes because there were so many black flies between my eyes and the ground that they blocked all light transmission. And they bite. It is a sneaky bite though. It isn’t like a deer fly that circles endlessly around your head, deftly dodging your flailing hands in a vain attempt to swat them out of the air before they dive into exposed skin and attack. The deer fly bite hurts. It brings a quick welt but if you can let the histamines dissipate, the pain goes away pretty quickly.

But the black fly bite is so much more destructive. It doesn’t hurt as bad as the deer fly. The black fly gets in, eats its pound of flesh and gets away. But it leaves a welt that is small and hard and leaves one with the impression that it has left a parasite inside of you waiting to come crawling out sometime in mid winter after eating your internal organs. For my Indiana friends think billions of flying chiggers. I have been assured that I have no parasites inside of me that need clear nail polish applied to kill the black fly young. But the welt does not go away and suddenly the next day the skin sloughs away leaving a pea sized hole in your arm, your shin, or the back of your neck.

Yes, we are in the middle of the dog days of vacation, working puzzles, reading books, and picking at

the open sores on our arms.

Like Dorothy, we click our red ruby slippers whispering there’s no place like home, looking forward to tomorrow; the first day of the rest of our summer vacation.

Take care

Roger.

On Top of the Hill

Dear Blog Reader

I hope that this finds you doing well. I am fine. Vacation continues apace. We actually got out and looked over the valley from the top of a very steep and very tall hill. It was more than worth it. I finally got two bars on my Verizon network. “Can you hear me now?” It was beautiful. The bugs paid

a healthy respect for the gallons of Deet that I had sprayed all over me. I was able to show the view to the two dimensional eye on my camera. Even in 2d it was impressive.

In the traditions of all great vacations, I also finished my vacation book early. It is a John Green book called Looking for Alaska. It was John Green’s first tragic high school girl dying book; long before The Fault in Our Stars. It is good to read tragic high school girl dying books on vacation just to remember what it was like to read them all of the time. High school girl dying books, and dog dying books always make me cry. I have to admit that John Green gets it. Near the end of the book, two of the surviving friends are remembering a poignant moment and the following conversation occurred.

The silence broke: “Sometimes I liked it.” I said. “Sometimes I liked it that she was dead.”

“You mean it felt good?”

“No. I don’t know. It felt . . . pure.”

“Yeah. I know. Me, too. It’s natural. I mean, it must be natural.”

That’s why we read high school girl and dog dying books. They are pure. A dose of purity is a good thing in a cabin in the woods by a lake where you can’t see the weather coming at you.

I would like to thank Amy Baker for the topic of the day. Amy responded to my post. “I would welcome your thoughts on the new-ish craze rehabbing shipping containers into tiny, cost effective, and highly designed homes. http://aplus.com/a/shipping-container-homes

It is a challenging, off the beaten path, kind of a topic; much like our path up the hill today. We were with a local guide. Thank you Lydia Wilson. She said there are two ways to go. One is the wide path that is a little bit longer. The other is this narrow path that is more direct but a little bit steeper. Always one to make decisions based on biblical metaphors I said lead us the narrow way and she did; straight up the side of granite strewn hillside; me carrying my 52 year old butt up the hill, at one point leaning forward on all fours to scratch and claw my way up the hill. For a while, I thought that I had misunderstood the metaphor and taken the road to hell. I made it though; with lungs and calves burning, we came up on top. We were out on top of a hill in the Adirondacks; a mountain in Indiana, and I finally had three bars on my phone; Heaven.

It took me a while to understand what a shipping container was. After looking at the website, I figured it out. They are those stackable trimodal containers that start out in China stacked 10 high on the deck of a trans-Pacific cargo boat. They are then shifted to two high stakes on the trains that go through Ingalls, Indiana before they are unloaded one high on semi trucks to go to their final destination along the East coast where they are disgorged of their TV’s, lawn care equipment or semi-precious whatnots and taken home by under employed ex-manufacturing workers. If you have never noticed the containers in your life but are an avid reader of mystery and suspense novels, you will recognize cargo containers as those boxes that sex slaves are smuggled in so effectively past customs agents in to the United States before the lone hero uncovers the plot and rescues the victims.

What do I think about turning basically railcars into highly designed homes? Boxcar Willy would have been proud. No matter how much siding and holes you cut into the side or how high you stack them, you are still living in a rectangular cube. I believe that is what we used to call a mobile home; which used to be tornado targets on edge of town but because of their unsightly nature, we have banished them to God knows where and replaced them with wood framed houses that blow away just as readily in a tornado.

And what’s with all of the “my house is better than your house?” There are double wides; triple wides, triple wides with a second story on top. There are offset two story single wides, single wides with the sides cut out to open up into the great out doors, and one single wide with wheels . . . which makes it a mobile home. And they all remind me of the architectural equivalent of building with really big legos; not the current version of legos with curves and angles different sizes but the old timey legos; each with six pegs on top.

Well the first day of the rest of my summer vacation is nearly over. Keep sending in topics. It keeps that brain working. For now, I am going to have another adult beverage and contemplate if this raccoon took the narrow-steep or the wide-not-so-steep path to poop on top of the hill and if he

thought that the relief was heavenly.

Take care,

Roger

The first day of the rest of summer vacation

Dear Blog Reader.     

I hope that this finds you doing well. I am doing fine. I am glad to report that we are currently enjoying the first day of the rest of our summer vacation. The first day of the rest of our summer vacation was a theme that was developed 2 years ago in Grand Haven, Michigan on the shores of Indiana Lake; over the July 4^th week. It was a glorious vacation. Distractions abounded. We rode parts of a 30 mile bike trail, went to the beach, bought bases and played kickball on a nearly abandoned ball diamond, listened to old vinyl records that the landlord had on a scratchy old turntable.

It was such a great vacation that we started lamenting on Monday that we only had 4 more days of vacation left. We decided that an attitude adjustment was needed. Viola; the first day of the rest of our summer vacation was born. That little thing made all of the difference. Do you want to waste time and take another nap? That’s fine. It’s the first day of the rest of summer vacation. There is plenty of time.

Speaking of time, I have let this day get away from me. I woke up bright and late, ate several pieces of French toast and sausage, took the trash to the trash station, lurked outside of the internet café before it opened to check email, facebook and the comments section of the blog to see if you had any great topic ideas. You didn’t but that is okay. Today is the first day of summer vacation. Futilely, I went looking for a bicycle tube for the Lovely Miss Beverly’s bike. Yes, we are on the backend of beyond; the far back of beyond.

Here I am with you making up for lost time. I am pretty glad that it is taking a few minutes for you go come up with blog subjects this week. It gives me the opportunity to do some long anticipated house cleaning. Yes, I am nearly to 15,000 blog reads so far. Thank you all for you long and vigilant reading of these pages. If you are a long time reader and have not yet started following. Click the link to the right to join in on the fun and the frivolity. You might regret it but really in the big scheme of things if that is the only thing that you have to regret, things are going pretty well.

In case you forgot, 29 years ago yesterday, a great cry went up in the land from all of the eligible young bachelors outside of Utah who realized that they would not be able to marry the lovely Miss Beverly. There was weeping and gnashing of teeth. We are spending the week here in the woods with several young newly wed and nearlyweds. Ah the beauty of young love, and the kids are doing fine also.

There has been a new trend in blog readership recently. Blogspot gives several pages of data on a dashboard. It lets the writer track blogs that are popular and the countries where blog readers hail from. Recently, the Ukraine has discovered “you said what? Roger” I do not know if it is a people wanting to escape the developments of another Russian invasion, but you are welcome to this humble endeavor. I would be very grateful if you sent a comment or two about how you found the blog and why you like the “Nice Mullet” blog so much.

For those of you not from the Ukraine and who have slept since November of 2011, “Nice Mullet” is a blog about an Amish man named Sam Mullet and his gang who were being investigated by the FBI for terrorizing other Amish by holding them down and shaving their hair and beards off. I provide some baseless theories about why a man named Mullet would go around giving others bad hair cuts.

That’s it for now. Don’t be afraid to come up with great blog ideas and send them to me. I will write about them on the first day of the rest of my summer vacation. I am turning off the computer now, opening another adult beverage and contemplating why Assassin deer would be defiantly flipping me off even in death.

Take care,

Roger.

Help! I can't see the weather coming.

Dear Blog Reader

I hope that this finds you doing well. Shoot!  I hope this finds you period. I have been kidnapped to the central Adirondacks on the “beautiful” Long Lake without cell coverage or internet service. I can’t believe it. Where is that travel brochure? I need to read the fine print. Oh. There it is “You’re out in the middle of no where damn it  of course Verizon’s cell phone coverage is very spotty and if the internet goes out good luck getting it restored by Tuesday of next week. Also bears have been known to push through screened windows and they can “create quite a mess””.  Darn it! I feel sorriest for the young people who are with us. I am the only one who isn’t relying on the cloud for music storage. So I am perfectly content with Iris Dement, Patty Griffin, and Mindy Smith. Those artists are not exactly in the young hipster’s repertoire.

The cabin in the woods is beautiful. The Lake is approximately 50 feet away; I think. The woods are too thick to see the shoreline here. The lovely Miss Beverly, when looking through a small gap in the trees off the back deck, quipped, “We are short sighted at Long Lake.” Next time I come I am bringing a chainsaw. I want to look at the lake from my screened in porch. I can look at maple trees and pine trees compete in any over landscaped yard in Indiana anytime.  I want to look at the “beautiful” Long Lake and give it the beautiful moniker through my own judgment.

I also want to declare my love for the terra-forming glacier’s of the ice age. There are small mountains all around me. How can I see advancing Assassin deer if every road is going around a curve, or cresting a hill, or plunging down a ravine? It is almost intolerable for an Indiana boy. This morning as we ventured out to the Hamlet of Long Lake we were confronted by a fawn and a wild turkey; too much nature. That’s not all. If the advertising motif of the central Adirondacks is to be believed, we are in black bear territory. In fact the next line of the fine print of the travel brochure warns Hoosiers to beware and shut the windows in the house because bears have been know to push through window screens to gain access into the house.

Help! I have been taken to the land of black flies, black bears, assassin dear and the woods. I was joking with a resident of the Hamlet of Long Lake about how uncomfortable it felt to not be able to look up and see the weather coming. It is comforting to know that I have a good 10 mile horizon to decide if I need to head for the storm cellar. Not in Long Lake. You got from here to that tree and that is on a clear day. The resident of Long Lake laughed and said, “Funny you see things that way. The whole time that I lived in Indiana I felt like I was being stalked by the sky.”

For the geographically challenged, the Hamlet of Long Lake is about 45 mile from Lake Placid. The miracle of Lake Placid was not the United States victory over the Soviets it was the fact that the world even found the place to go compete.

There you have it. I am on vacation. As an inveterate goal setter, I have some things to accomplish this week. Number 1; enjoy the lovely Miss Beverly’s company. Number 2: make my peace with the terrain. Number 3; ride my bike out of this hole called Tarbell Hill Rd (for my Hilly Hundred Friends, it eats Mt Tabor’s for breakfast). Number 4; write a blog a day.

Each morning, I will make my way down to the internet café to read emails, blog comments and Facebook posts. For this week only, I will write about any topic one of you may faithful readers suggest. Let me know what it is.

For now, I am going to have another glass of wine and marvel at how much the cushion on the Adirondack chair across the screened in porch looks like a monster’s face.

Take care,

Roger

Smarter than the Average Bear

Dearest Blog Reader.

I hope that this finds you doing well. I am fine. Spring/Summer has arrived and I spent last week getting the garden in Amish Child condition. If you are new, Amish Child gardens, along with assassin deer are recurring themes of You Said What Roger. The phrase came to my head while traveling with the family through Pennsylvania Amish country one summer marveling at how clean the gardens looked. While filled with zucchini envy, I figured out that the reason for the weed free situation of these gardens was the fact that the Amish have relatively large families and no video games to occupy their large brimmed, hat covered minds. Houses filled with undistracted youths during summer vacation are rapidly evacuated by mothers who love the peace and quiet of the school year. Chores are assigned and viola gardens are kept in pristine weed free Amish Child condition.

Last year, after several years of well intentioned failure, I rededicated my summer free time to maintaining a great looking garden. I was amazed. You can grow so many more vegetables on a smaller piece of land when they don’t have to compete with pig weed, velvet leaf or jimson weed.

Enough gardening; two weeks ago, I read a headline that stopped me in my tracks. It boldly proclaimed that 4% of Americans believe that they are less intelligent than average. There you go. It explains so much. Once again the failure of our school systems staggers me. By definition 49% of the population are less intelligent than average. So 45% are delusional. (I know. I know Mr. or Miss Smarty pants you could have some really funky distribution of the smart and the less smart that left only 4% below average but that is not the case here. 49% of us are less intelligent than the average. I just know it.)

I suppose that there are other explanations. The 45% probably have gone to the Internet for their research. The Internet would have provided good information about the Darwin Awards. The 45% would correctly assume that they were smarter than that dumb a*&%. However, they made a strategic error in their analysis. Once a Darwin Award winner has gathered their certificate of participation at the pearly gates, they have gotten out of the stupid pool. They are no longer available for comparison. The 45% are still just as fuzzy on the facts.

None of the 45% have climbed out of intellectual sub-mediocrity. In fact, for every past Darwin Award winner, one of the smart loses their tenuous grip on mediocrity and slipped past the tipping point with the rest of the less thans.

Other explanations? How about too many participation awards? This over inflated drive to build self-esteem has warped our perspective. The over awarding of participation could be a cause for this lack of self-awareness. At the spelling bee if little Johnny receives a participation award for misspelling “dawg” and little Suzie receives the same participation award for misspelling “there” when it should have been “their” because in her enthusiasm she did not ask for it to be used in a sentence, little Johnny doesn’t learn to study harder next time. He got his award just like the over-enthusiastic Suzie. In this world, they are both about average.

Look at little Johnny eating dirt; we should give him an award for being the best dirt eater in the 1^st grade. NO we shouldn’t. We should ignore little Johnny’s earthworm proclivities. He’ll get over it. Dirt doesn’t taste that good. And for goodness sake we shouldn’t feed the rest of the kids dirt pudding with the little gummy worms in a flowerpot. It just lets Johnny think that eating dirt is something to be emulated thereby casting himself into the world of the self-deluded.

This over inflated sense of self has a name. According to Wikipedia (a big contributor to the ‘I’m just as smart as you” crowd), 45% of Americans suffer from illusory superiority. Or as my dad liked to say “Don’t worry about them son. They think that their poop doesn’t stink.” Actually that is a paraphrase of what dad used to say. Illusory superiority is a huge field. In fact in 2000, two guys won a Nobel Prize for a paper called “Unskilled and Unaware of it: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessment.” It was subtitled “Don’t worry about them son. They think that their poop doesn’t stink.” Dad was thinking about bringing plagiarism charges but he had to admit that he got that one from granddad.

So there you have it. We live in a world where the smart write 500 page papers for ideas that our parents and grand parents synthesized in fewer words than the Noble winning paper’s title; a world where the heights of achievement are so level that even the mud puddles look average. We live in a world where we have lost the humility to accept and embrace those who have excelled through raw talent and application to heights beyond our own. We have lost the ability to know whose paper to copy off of.

Take care,

Roger