SHOCKINGLY, THIS WAS NOT STEPHEN GREEN: Man smuggles vodka into festival by burying it on site weeks earlier. Though I think Stephen’s experience is that when you arrive by helicopter, they don’t check your bags. Sydney Concerts at the Domain circa 1985- 1999 ;-)
Paris’s Bureau of Found Objects includes a wedding dress and a human skull. People who come to claim a lost possession often lose another in the processes
David Benatar appreciates that the human condition is a predicament, an unsatisfactory state of affairs that calls for some sort of amelioration or escape. For Benatar, however, our predicament is a tragic one from which there is no escape. We are caught in an "existential vise" between life and death. "Life is bad, but so is death." Neither are bad in every way, but both are "in crucial respects, awful." (1-2) We are in a bind, a fix, a jam, we can't get out, and there is no one to help us.
Cosmically viewed, our lives are meaningless. "We are insignificant specks in a vast universe that is utterly indifferent to us." (2) I would say that indifference is a human attitude, a deficient mode of caring. So I would put Benatar's point by saying that the universe is not even indifferent to us. That our lives are ultimately meaningless is of course consistent with our lives being suffused with various mundane or proximate meanings and purposes.
Maverick Philosopher: David Benatar, The Human Predicament, Introduction
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| Horace Rumpole, the legendary criminal barrister of the Old Bailey, is back in action in another entertaining mystery from John Mortimer, the author of one Rumpole novel and twelve Rumpole collections, many of which formed the basis for the phenomenally popular PBS-TV series of some years ago |
“The digital age has made everyone want to get their hands into things and get dirty and messy and make things out of clay. With that comes the voice of the hand, which is inherently imperfect.” …[Read More]
Boredom, in today's world, is fleeting. Because of our
phones -- supercomputers, but pocket-sized -- we're never more than a
moment away from something to distract us from our idle time (battery
life permitting). That may seem like a bad thing -- our brains need a
rest and chores, like doing dishes or taking out the trash, need
attending to. But it turns out, there may be an even greater benefit to
being bored. To figure out why, let's read a phone book.
Nah, that sounds terrible. Instead, let's read about other people who
were instructed to read a phone book.
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For those of you who are too young to know what a
"phone book" is, there's one pictured above. That section or
book was called the "white pages," and it contained a listing
of people, addresses, and their phone numbers. (Some businesses or
municipal offices were sometimes published in larger type and/or
highlighted, but you get the point.) If you want to read a good, engaging
book, there are plenty of other options. If you want to read
something boring, read the phone book.
That's what Dr. Sandi Mann, a philosophy professor at the University of
Central Lancashire, decided to have her test subjects do. Dr. Mann, who
studies boredom (which, if you think about it, creates a personal paradox
for her), co-authored a paper with student Rebekah Cadman
investigating the impact that boredom had on creativity. The Harvard
Business Review explains the set-up:
Participants were either assigned the boring task of
copying numbers from a phone book or assigned to a control group, which
skipped the phone book assignment. All participants were then asked to
generate as many uses as they could for a pair of plastic cups. This is a
common test of divergent thinking—a vital element for creative output
that concerns ones ability to generate lots of ideas.
The result: those who copied from the phone book came up
with notably more creative uses for the cups. Being bored, it seems,
resulted in more creative juice flowing.
Their theory was that when the brain is seemingly idle, it wanders, and
we daydream. So, Mann and Cadman decided to continue the experiment and
turn the boredom up a notch in hopes of finding more evidence to support
this thesis. In this second phase, there were three groups. One group
read entries from the phone book to the second group, which recorded what
they heard. The third group -- the control group -- skipped the phone
book portion altogether. Science Daily summarizes the results.
Again the researchers found that the people in the control
group were least creative, but the people who had just read the names
were more creative than those who had to write them out. This suggests
that more passive boring activities, like reading or perhaps attending
meetings, can lead to more creativity -- whereas writing, by reducing the
scope for daydreaming, reduces the creativity-enhancing effects of
boredom.
So if you're looking to do something creative, it may be a
good idea to find something boring to accomplish first. Not only will you
get a chore out of the way -- those dishes aren't going to wash themselves!
-- but you may also unlock some added brilliance.
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Bonus fact: In 2013, a few firefighters in Oregon were bored --
and one of their friends decided to do something about it. A
then-23-year-old named Sadie Renee Johnson lit a firework and tossed
it into some roadside brush, aiming to give her friends a fire to put
out. Unfortunately, her plan went much better than she intended. As
Digital Journal notes, "although the blaze was
discovered within 15 minutes, it could not be controlled immediately.
Eventually, the fire, named as the Sunnyside Turnoff wildfire, spread to
about 80 square miles — 51,000 acres — costing nearly $8 million to fight
and took two months to bring under complete control." Johnson was
arrested and earned herself some boredom; she was subsequently sentenced to 18 months in prison.
From the Archives: Japan’s First NHL Player: He's a creative
creation borne from boredom.
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