Unique like everyone else

It is 2:30am and I should be asleep. I am approaching my 15th hour on the computer because my mission in life is to damage my brain. And my eyes. And my sense of time. As I sit here searching rigorously for that stupid fiery fox, I wonder what kind of marketing technique apple threw onto the icon-design industry. Everything is blurry.

It is now 2:45. Finally, through the thick fluid pool of tear-ridden eye cracks and unique temporal dithering, I find the blurry blue and orange icon and perform the one true thing I know. a click for chrrissake.

At last I arrive at my home(page), which is the New York Times (I won’t get into why it is the New York Times, don’t worry). Immediately I panic, clap and drown in that far-to-familiar painting. It’s blurry but I know exactly what it is. I lose my mind and click on “Several Circles”, that crazy genius mind-sucking Kandinsky painting. It leads me to an article: The Circular Logic of the Universe. I sneer. What do they know about circles? “They” as in those perfect, employed people at the New York Times.  Still, I read the article. Perhaps out of green-eyed, malicious curiosity, or perhaps because I do at the end of the day know that I’m an idiot. The article begins:

Circling my way not long ago through the Vasily Kandinsky show now on display in the suitably spiral setting of the Guggenheim Museum, I came to one of the Russian master’s most illustrious, if misleadingly named, paintings: “Several Circles”….

Those “several” circles, I saw, were more like three dozen, and every one of them seemed to be rising from the canvas, buoyed by the shrewdly exuberant juxtapositioning of their different colors, sizes and apparent translucencies….I …learned of Kandinsky’s growing love affair with the circle. The circle, he wrote, is “the most modest form, but asserts itself unconditionally.” It is “simultaneously stable and unstable,” “loud and soft,” “a single tension that carries countless tensions within it.”

Four years ago I walked into the Guggenheim on academic assignment. It was for an essay course at NYU. I don’t remember the nature of the assignment. All I remember is that I opened and closed the Guggenheim that day. And NOT because I was panting for more inspiration. I simply could not escape. The farther I walked from the entrance, the closer I got to the same side from which I started. The entrance. The landmark? A white (unpadded!) wall with one Kandinsky painting–”Several Circles”–turning this prestigious cylinder of international art into one terrifying hamster-wheel-of-an-experience. So I wrote an essay about it in Teenager, describing my “fall” which was “head first into the deep, round ravine of wild worries; the endless babble that buffers my anatomy from the painted circle. I hit middle distance and began to forget who I was, where I was and if I was supposed to go anywhere at all.”

Is that what Kandinsky meant by “simultaneously stable and unstable,” “loud and soft,” “a single tension that carries countless tensions within it”? Then I guess he must be good. I mean the man can market a circle. I give him that.

So bravo New York Times for dipping into the existential. Perhaps you’ve grasped the market’s biggest challenge: Generation Y. Or maybe its the writer. Either way, as a victim of this economic couch-potato crisis, I conclude the following from this article:

1. I have (finally) found my mind
2. When I finally get around to (or go insane and start) developing a Time Machine, I’m traveling back to the late 19th Century and marrying Kandinsky.
3. I am simply unique like everyone else; and that is, we’re all a bunch of circles, living circular lives, residing in a circle, which is in another circle, wrapped around a planet that is NOT in the center of a universe filled with orbiting spherical stars and planets.

Climate Change

My Comment on the New York Times Climate Change Conversation about the climate change debate and the international conference on global warming being held Dec. 7-18 in Copenhagen.

Squeak AND Forever Hold Your Peace: the Hypocritical Proverbs of Man

or, song of themselves…

A List of Proverbs in Couplets Contrasted

Look before you you leap.
He who hesitates is lost.

If at first u don’t succeed, try, try, and try again.
Don’t beat your head against a stone wall.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder.
Out of site out, of mind.

Two heads are better than one.
Paddle your own canoe.

Haste makes waste.
Time waits for no man.

You are never too old to learn.
You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

One word is sufficient to the wise.
Talk is cheap.

Better safe than sorry.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Nice guys finish last.

Don’t judge a book by its cover.
Clothes make the man.

The squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Silence is golden.

Birds of a feather flock together.
Opposites attract.

The pen is mightier than the sword.
Actions speak louder than words.

All of these are actual proverbs from the same, rather confusing book. You can do the research.

by Rena Silverman

The Under-Cover-Letter Man, by Rena Silverman

Or, How Many Application Letters Does a Man Have to Write, Before He Can Stop Being a Man?

Few things are more demoralizing than writing job application letters.

“There you are trying at once to write something that shows that you fit in,” says John Doyle., “while at the same time you’re trying to show you’re different.”

Doyle knows this agony well. After the dot-com bubble, he lost his job as a computer programmer and he began sending out ten to fifteen letters per day. “There is nothing worse than trying to sell yourself to a stranger,” he says. “For me, it went on for month after month.”

After diligently sending out the letters and receiving no responses, Doyle finally decided to see whether his results would be different if he wrote a letter that was nakedly honest. So Doyle sat down and wrote the brazen truth about his strengths and weaknesses.

“I know how to program in Java Scripts,” he said in one letter, referring to a computer program that was required for the job. “By that I mean I’ve used the program several times before, but like everyone else I will go look in a book when I’m asked to use it.” He also wrote that he had been trained at a specific university, but then he added, “Truth is, I took a class once at that university and then I dropped out. But I’m pretty sure you won’t check.” He referred to himself as a “team leader,” which he qualified by saying, “In other words, my boss likes me enough that if you call him he will say I am a ‘team leader.’ “

No one responded to Doyle’s letter. “That’s no worse than what was the case in the past,” he points out.

Soon, Doyle began writing all of his letters with self-defeated frankness. And as his cell phone remained a buzzless box, he grew more surprised by the lack of reaction. “I was applying to all these places that said they valued creativity,” he says. “But then when creativity hit them in the face, they didn’t even know it.” He did not expect to get hired, but he did expect that at least one person in the several hundred human-resources offices he contacted would drop him a note simply saying thanks for the clever humor. It never happened.

In frustration, Doyle shifted his approach, moving from candor to absurdity.

Previously he had been sending his real resume. He replaced it with a sheet of paper with “RESUME” underlined at the top and the words “Hire Me,” and nothing else, in seventy-two-point lettering in the center of the page.

His cover letters featured a wry sense of humor. In one letter he explained that his prior job with Ford Motors involved leading the programming team in charge of assembly-line robotics. “My experience there taught me about the maximum speed and force with which you could have the robot insert a new part, without damaging the chassis of the vehicle,” he wrote. “I feel that this experience will translate almost seamlessly to Transplantation Services at your hospital, and I
think you will agree.”

If anyone was laughing, they weren’t telling John Doyle.
But one day he finally struck a chord, in a letter for a job opening at a bookstore. Having opened with the standard formalities about his sales experience and ability to work flexible hours, he wrote, “Should you require further information, or additional references, please do not hesitate to call. Also, do not hesitate to call if you are curious as to who would win in a fight between Ernest Hemingway and Morley Callaghan.”

It continued: “Callaghan did win, during a friendly match where F. Scott Fitzgerald kept time. He did not keep it very well, and the winning blow was struck after the time had gone over, leading Hemingway to accuse F. Scott of rigging the match. A ridiculous literary feud followed, along with some pretty good books by all involved.”

Doyle says he is still not sure why the bookstore hired him.

“I don’t know,” he said, “I guess they were looking for someone that customers would enjoy talking to but who also knew something about books.”

posted by rena silverman

If the #2 pencil is so cool, why is it still #2? by Rena Silverman

Anyway, sharpen your mediocre pencils and listen up. This is a math test. If you fail you can go play the lottery (it’s just a tax on people who are bad at math).

Please sharpen your number two pencils.

1) After 11 years years of service, a math teacher receives an $80 gift certificate to Shaw’s Gas in lieu of a raise. How much of that money will be left after taxes? Express in bottles of rum.

2) A name-brand bottle of rum costs $12.95. The generic brand sells for $7.50. If a math teacher buys 4 bottles of generic rum each week, how much does he save each month? How much does he save each year? How much money does the teacher save over the course of 11 years?

3) A math teacher’s new apartment is approximately 12 ft. long and 5 ft. wide, and the bathroom takes up 50% of the apartment. A normal human-sized bed is 6 ft x 3 ft. Does the math teacher have enough room for a standard bed? Or will he have to sleep in some kind of cat bed?

4) By order of the high courts, a math teacher must keep 1,000 ft. away from his ex-wife at all times. Say, theoretically, she lives on 91st and York, exactly halfway between the math teacher’s apartment and his school. How far out of his way does the teacher have to walk every morning just to keep from getting arrested?

5) A math teacher is frightened 95% of the time. How many hours a day is he frightened? What she so afraid of?

posted by rena silverman

An Urgent and Confidential Note from Nigeria on Misinterpreting Foreign Business Gestures…

…or, Lots of animals here…would you like to ride on your own ass??

They are as desperate as they are formulaic. And with the spread of the Internet, the so-called “Nigerian letters” have grown from being an occasional curiosity to a relentless plague on our in-boxes.

Under a subject line that reads “Urgent and Confidential,” these scams usually open with, “I am in search of a reputable person to assist me with an urgent business matter.” And they go on to explain that some important government official has died and that there is a need to remove a large amount of money from the country before other officials seize it.
“Any help you provide in the effort,” the e-mail usually says, “will be repaid with a large percentage of the money.” And while the ubiquity of these scam emails should undermine their effectiveness, somehow they persist.

In 1996, Steven Cooper was receiving an average of four or five of the letters by fax and e-mail per day. “What got to me about them was the sheer quantity,” says Cooper, a fifty-one-year-old chemist based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. “They’re also amazingly foolish and blatant scams.

So one day Cooper decided to reply.

Using an alias, he wrote that he wanted to learn more about the business offer. And with that, he began a ten-year habit of scamming the scammers as he wove elaborate webs—often cast with characters drawn from history or famous works of fiction-looping the scammers into drawn-out correspondences that sometimes lasted up to a year.

“These scams are ridiculous,” he says. “But they’ve definitely provided me with quite a bit of fun.”

For every half-baked explanation a scammer sent about the origin of the money, Cooper included an implausible feature to his own story.

With each fake tax form or faux lawyer’s bill that the scammer sent to justify the need for small amounts of money, Cooper replied with a fake newspaper profile or an official-looking travel itinerary to bolster his own responses.

Before long, Steven Cooper found himself juggling multiple stories at once, spending close to twenty-five hours a week keeping the scammers looped in. “I’m much more efficient now since I have a lot of the documents on file,” he says. “Still, creating new stories takes a fair amount of work.”

But none compare to his masterpiece about Don Quixote. “I think that was definitely my best work,” Cooper says.

After being contacted by an African scammer calling himself Derin Owolabi, Cooper responded as Don Quixote. “I do not know if I can help you but I do take pride in supporting worthy quests,” Mr. Quixote wrote. “I am a country gentleman, no longer young.”
Always sprinkled with direct passages from Cervantes’s classic work, the communications quickly culminated in Owolabi’s request that Mr. Quixote come to visit him in Benin to finalize the deal.

Mr. Quixote agreed to the request. But first he explained that he would need to travel with two others. “My party would include my faithful servant, Sancho Panza, and my Lady Dulcinea,” he wrote.

All are welcome, Owolabi responded.

Next, Mr. Quixote wrote that there was a problem with the flight: Air France said that he could not bring his horse on board.

“If Air France does not want to carry your horse, don’t worry,” Owolabi replied. “I am going to make arrangements to hire one for you in Cotonou. “

Many letters and much planning later, the two men finally spoke on the phone. Owolabi mentioned that Mr. Quixote sounded young for his age. Never passing up an opportunity to press the limits of credulity, Mr. Quixote replied that, in fact, he looked even younger than he sounded because he had received plastic surgery. “I owe all my looks to Dr. Polly Urethane, a plastic surgeon at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Fe,” he said.

Finally, after sending Owolabi their official travel itinerary, Mr. Quixote and his entourage set out on their journey.

Unfortunately, Mr. Quixote ran into problems after he lost his temper in Paris.
“French See Red over Attack on Moulin Rouge” was the headline that ran in the SOCIÉTÉ DE L’OISEAU EN CAGE, which Mr. Quixote’s lawyer sent to Owolabi to explain what happened. The article said that three American tourists had stolen horses from Parisian police officers and charged the famous theater, ominously waving baguettes. After being arrested, the three were later released. Eventually, the lawyer said, Mr. Quixote and his group got back on their way. They flew to Cairo, where they were to proceed overland to Benin.

That’s when the real tragedy struck.

“It is with a heavy heart that I must convey to you the melancholy news that Mr. Don Quixote has been found dead in the north Sahara,” read the next e-mail that came from Mr. Quixote’s lawyer. Attached was a newspaper article-which like all of Cooper’s handiwork was impressively realistic-that explained that Mr. Quixote had been attacked by a pack of about forty men led by a man named Ali Baba. Cooper says that although he has been spinning ridiculous yarns for years in correspondences with scammers, few people ever seem to catch on.

“Considering that they are scam artists themselves, it’s incredible how thick some of these people are,” says Cooper, who has posted his many epistolary exchanges with the scammers on his Web site, www.redhotchilidogs.com. “The only time I’ve been snagged by a reference was a lady who realized that the picture I sent of myself was actually of our governor Bill Richardson.”

Cooper says that he has received half a dozen emails over the years from people who actually lost money in these scams. One person said that her semi senile father had mailed more than $45,000 in response to a solicitation.

“For me,” he says, “it just seemed logical to turn the table on these people.”

posted by Rena Silverman

The Ten Commandments of Partisan Warfare

1. Keep it simple
A long-winded, nuanced, complex argument is a guaranteed ticket to disaster. Just ask John Kerry or Al Gore or Michael Dukakis. To be effective, you need to be able to fit your basic message on a
bumper sticker.

2. Personalize the issue
Don’t talk about issues in an abstract way. Persuade by talking in terms of how issues affect people, relate your own experiences, and highlight your opponent’s self-interest (e.g., show them how Republican policies mean more money in their pocket, more personal freedom, and more jokes from the likes of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, at the expense of Republicans).

3. Frame the Argument to your advantage
Make your case by presenting each issue according to your own beliefs and values, not theirs. Never, for example, let a sanctimonious liberal elitist lecture you about values or the meaning of tolerance. If you let them frame the debate, they win.

4. Find common ground
Build your street cred with liberals by badmouthing a despised conservative—say, Ann Coulter or Pat Robertson. That way you’ll defy stereotypes and demonstrate that your allegiances are not blind. Continue to rope them in by appealing to shared values and common interests before unleashing your Trojan horse–style sneak attack.

5. Expose Hypocrisy
Nothing undermines an argument faster than exposing hypocritical behavior, contradictory statements, and wholesale fakery—either on the part of your opponents or the politicians they’re defending. There are few sights as satisfying as watching exposed hypocrites grasp at fig leaves to cover their shame.

6. Exude Confidence
Always project the courage of your convictions. Like bees and dogs, your opponent can smell fear and weakness. How you say something is just as important as what you say.

7. Don’t Sermonize
No one likes to be lectured to, and no one likes a self-righteous windbag. Ranting from atop your soapbox will only harden your opponent’s position and make him or her more hostile. If you’ve made an enemy, you haven’t won an argument.

8. Make Your Opponent Laugh
Humor can be a potent weapon in political debate. Making humorous observations—and demonstrating an ability to laugh at yourself—will help disarm your opponents and keep them engaged. If funny isn’t your thing, quote professional quipsters like Dennis Miller or unintentional comedians like Howard Dean.

9. Be Open-Minded
It’s the civility, stupid. Be prepared to listen respectfully and concede a point or two before moving in for the kill. You can learn a lot from people with whom you disagree—even those you believe to be outrageously misguided—and fine-tune your arguments in the process.

10. Pick Battles You Can Win
Don’t expend too much energy trying to win over a staunch conservative. You’d have better luck trying to coax a rock to grow. Target the fence-sitters and the more easily converted. It’s a strategy that has worked for religious missionaries for centuries, and it can work for you.

www.rena-silverman.com