Tag: ABC Wednesday

Z is for zzzzzzzz

4-7-8 increases oxygen in the system.

sleepMore than occasionally, I’ve had trouble with insomnia. Almost always, I fall asleep easily enough. But I often wake up four, three, or even two hours later, my brain half-alert, trying to figure out some time management and/or technological problem.

Someone gave me links to a meditation regimen, and I’ve signed up for others, but I hadn’t found time to actually DO any of them.

Thus, I was intrigued by this CBS News piece about getting a better night’s sleep, a problem that a reported 40 million Americans experience. Key to this process is the 4-7-8 breathing techniques of Dr. Joseph Weil.

After exhaling, one breathes in on a count of four, holds the breath for a count of seven, then exhales over a count of eight. One does this 5-10 times. It increases oxygen in the system. The technique had some positive effects on me.

More tricky to implement is a better nightly routine. The last hour before bed should consist of:
20 minutes to organize – maybe pack tomorrow’s lunch, get papers together
20 minutes hygiene – brush teeth and the like
20 minutes relaxation – reading (NOT online, NOT on a Kindle or the like), praying, meditating, doing yoga or breathing exercises.

If I could only be that organized…
***
I once tried to cheat sleep, and for a year I succeeded.

The Zs with No Whys.

ABC Wednesday – Round 16

Y is for Yellow

Yellow helps with decision making as it relates to clarity of thought and ideas, although it can often be impulsive.

Color_icon_yellow.svgWhen I graduated from library school in 1992, I discovered that the Academic Degree color for library science was yellow, specifically lemon yellow. I felt rather ambivalent about that.

I knew that in color psychology, “yellow is the color of the mind and the intellect. It is optimistic and cheerful. However, it can also suggest impatience, criticism, and cowardice.”

“The word ‘yellow’ comes from the Old English geolu, geolwe (oblique case), meaning ‘yellow, yellowish’, derived from the Proto-Germanic word gelwaz ‘yellow’. It has the same Indo-European base, gʰel-, as the word yell; gʰel- means both bright and gleaming, and to cry out. Yellow is a color which cries out for attention.”

More about yellow:

“Yellow is the great communicator and loves to talk. Yellow is the color of the networker and the journalist, all working and communicating on a mental level.

Yellow is the scientist, constantly analyzing, looking at both sides before making a decision; methodical and decisive. Yellow is the entertainer, the comic, the clown.

“Yellow helps with decision making as it relates to clarity of thought and ideas, although it can often be impulsive. Yellow helps us focus, study and recall information, useful during exam time.

“The color yellow can be anxiety-producing as it is fast-moving and can cause us to feel agitated.

“Yellow has a tendency to make you more mentally analytical and critical – this includes being self-critical as well as critical of others.

A lot of this rings true – communicative, analytical, impulsive, self-critical.

And this:

“Lurking in the background is the dark side of yellow: cowardice, betrayal, egoism, and madness. Furthermore, yellow is the color of caution and physical illness (jaundice, malaria, and pestilence).”

Still:

“Yellow is the lightest and brightest color on the Basic Color Wheel and in the full spectrum of light. Even some blind people can detect yellow. This is why it’s often used for ambulances and emergency vehicles.”

Here are some songs featuring the color yellow:

Yellow Moon – Neville Brothers

Yellow Submarine – The Beatles

Mellow, Yellow – Donovan

ABC Wednesday – Round 16

ABC Wednesday is coming again, but not forever

ABC Wednesday will conclude, but not until the end of Round 20

abc 17 (1)It’s now EIGHT years ago that Denise Nesbitt from across the pond in England created a meme called ABC Wednesday. People, literally from around the world, post an item – pictures, poems, essays – that in some way describe each letter of the alphabet, in turn. I’ve been participating since the letter K in Round 5.

Denise recruited a team of her followers to do some of the intro writing and visiting, which eventually included me because doing it all was too exhausting.

Three years ago, she ceded the role of administrator to me. This means that I assign who reads which posts, making sure somebody is writing the introductions (and writing them myself, when necessary) and inserting the link that allows everyone to participate.

The Netiquette for the site is this:

1. Post something on your non-commercial blog/webpage having something to do with the letter of the week. Use your imagination. Put a link to ABC Wednesday in your post and/or put up the logo.

2. Come to the ABC Wednesday site and link the SPECIFIC link to the Linky thing. It’ll be available around 4 p.m., Greenwich Mean Time each Tuesday, which is 11 a.m. or noon in the Eastern part of the United States.

3. Try and visit at least 5 other participants, and comment on their posts. The more sites you do visit, the more comments you will probably get.

Now, as the cliché goes, all good things must come to an end, and Denise and Roger have decided that ABC Wednesday should conclude, for a variety of reasons. The good news is that it won’t be until the end of Round 20, or four more trips through the alphabet.

We have discovered that there are folks who participate in a round, then drop out for a bit. Others start a round, but don’t complete. We think this will be an opportunity to invite those folks to participate once again.

Or maybe you have friends who have THOUGHT about tying ABC Wednesday but have not. THIS would be a good time to start.

Here’s a deep, dark secret: you don’t HAVE to participate every week. I think it’s advantageous to do so – it generates a lot of comments for me, but then again, I visit practically everyone who posts.

Bloggers, consider giving ABC Wednesday a try, if this sounds interesting. The A comes up the week of July 13, so you have some time to think about it. Write to me a rogerogreen (AT) gmail (DOT) com for more details.

V is for veeblefetzer

In Don Rosa’s 1997 story “An Eye for Detail”, Donald Duck goes to work in Uncle Scrooge’s veeblefetzer factory.

face partsWhat DO you call that thing which is, you know, that, er, doohickey, a “thing that’s too unimportant to have a name of its own, or whose name you have for the moment forgotten”?

One word is veeblefetzer:

A word usually used facetiously as a placeholder name for any obscure or complicated object or mechanism, such as automobile parts, computer code and model railroad equipment.

A 19th-century Yiddish language slang word with limited usage is generally accepted as the origin. In German, the verb weben means to “weave”, while fetzen means to “rip” or “shred”…

[In the 1940s] Alfred J. Gross… invented the walkie-talkie… He was the father of Citizens’ Band radio, and for his “handle” he used the pseudonym “Phineas Thadeus Veeblefetzer”.

A few years later, Harvey Kurtzman brought the word into popular usage in his comic book Mad…

In other words, we’re talking whatchamacallits, such as:
Aglet – the piece of plastic covering the ends of your shoelace
Ferrule – the metal band that connects the pencil eraser to the end of the pencil
Tragus – the little piece of cartilage that sticks out at the front side of your ear.

ABC Wednesday – Round 16

U for USA’s obsession with the car (Five Photos, Five Stories #2)

ChevroletI’m reading my email one insomniac night when I see this Quora question: Why is jaywalking a crime in the US but not in the UK? One lengthy response from a guy named Tom Chambers:

Because jaywalking is a crime invented by the car industry in the early 20th century. It wasn’t the legislative response to an inevitable problem, but essentially a publicity campaign to increase car use in the US.

Prior to jaywalking becoming a popular term and crime, pedestrians were assumed to have the right to the road. If there was an accident, popular opinion and the media would be on the side of the pedestrian and assume the fault of the driver.

The motor industry recognised that this was an impediment to driving and set out to make the street a place for cars not people. They lobbied for various laws to prevent people from crossing other than at a designated point, but people were so against this that it failed to be effectively enforced.

What worked much better was public ridicule.

The American love affair with cars was no accident, confirmed Scientific American. “Schools helped train new generations of children to avoid the streets when the American Automobile Association (AAA) became the top supplier of safety curriculum for U.S. schools in the 1920s,” As a result, there is a deep-seated bias in transportation decision making that can be traced “all the way back to the dawn of the automotive era.”

But the deal wasn’t sealed until 1961, and one can blame, or credit, Groucho Marx:

It was on Sunday night [October 22] when NBC aired a program called “Merrily We Roll Along”—promoted as “the story of America’s love affair with the automobile.” During the show, host Groucho Marx introduced the “love affair” metaphor to millions of viewers, casting cars as “the new girl in town.” To make this love work, Marx explained, Americans were willing to overcome intrusive regulations, endure awful traffic jams, and if necessary, redesign entire cities.

“We don’t always know how to get along with her, but you certainly can’t get along without her,” said Marx. “And if that isn’t marriage, I don’t know what is.”

[The show] was less a story about America’s existing love affair with the car than the invention of that very idea. The show’s sponsor, DuPont, had an obvious interest: it owned 23 percent of General Motors at the time. [It was] a “masterstroke of public relations” manufactured by the car industry to counter the likes of… critics who, at the dawn of the interstate highway era, questioned the wisdom of dedicating every inch of urban street space to personal vehicles.

This perhaps explains why people choose cars, even when mass transit would serve them better. But the American love affair with the motor car may be running on empty, with “baby boomers… giving up the suburbs for communities with more travel choices, [and] younger adults… delaying getting a driver’s license and, when they do, they are not buying cars or using them as much. Instead, they are embracing new forms of ‘collaborative consumption’ – sharing vehicles through car-share and bike-share programmes.”

Personally, I think this is a terrific trend. Now if I can only walk across the street, or ride my bike without possibly getting killed…
***
Note: I have been nominated by my buddy Lisa over at Peripheral Perceptions to participate in the Five Photos, Five Stories meme, which simply says I should post a photo each day for five consecutive days and attach a story to the photo. It can be fiction or non-fiction, a poem or a short paragraph and each day nominate another blogger for the challenge.

The problem is that almost all my posts are stories and have pictures. So I’m cheating and writing only one new post. And I’m nominating YOU!

ABC Wednesday – Round 16

Ramblin' with Roger
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