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23 November 2011

How to... be religious, by Guy Browning

PCS get-together at Gene's, 7/9/11

How to... be religious

If religion is the opium of the masses, then it's the one drug-related issue that's clearing up fast. Spirituality is the direct, online, serve-yourself way of getting in touch with higher issues and is as popular as ever. Religion, on the other hand, is the old, bricks-and-mortar way of doing it, and it is dying out quicker than your local post office.

One big reason for this is that finding religion is a way of giving your problems to someone else. The reason why so many religious people seem so happy is because they are relieved not to have to ask themselves any more difficult questions. Instead, they can refer to their Holy Book, which is generally the word of God.

There are many different versions of the Holy Book, depending on which reporter was around at the time. You also have to remember that the word of God has generally been translated through 13 different languages. Would you trust the instructions on your microwave if you knew they'd come via the same route?


Religions are all man-made; that's why there are so many of them. They all have different branding, different packaging and broadly hold out the same promises, mostly of the sort that can't be held up in a court of law. Like other products, each religion promises to make your soul whiter than white and to shift stubborn stains on your character. Once you pick a religion that claims to be the best, you are obliged to think less of other people's religions. This gives rise to all sorts of hatred and unpleasantness, which fortunately religion allows you to be forgiven for. All good religions insist that other religions are mistaken - and, of course, they're all absolutely right.

If you're confident that you're part of the one true religion, then you might like to try out someone else's religion for a while. Of course, if you have any doubts, then it's best to stay at home and increase the level of your fervour. Fervour is religious alcohol in that it makes you feel better on the inside but look stupid from the outside, and eventually the effect wears off, leaving you feeling worse than when you started.

There aren't many religions that are made by women. Women tend to concentrate on the spiritual, which is something completely different and doesn't require the erection of big buildings. In fact, another good way of looking to see what kind of religion you've picked is to see how they pick their ministers and how these ministers then treat people who aren't the same sex as they are. If you have your doubts, simply apply fervour and all will be well.

****

For more of Guy Browning's How to series (Live Together, Be Content, Live, Die, Poach an Egg, Go With the Flow, Exercise, Eat Healthily, Cook Something Really Impressive, Be Beautiful, Pass the Time, Be Cool, Be Deep, Grow Up, Socialize, Go to a Party, Flirt, Be Suave, Be Good in Bed, and hundreds more) please click here.

How to... attract men / How to... attract women - by Guy Browning

 Camilla Belle

How to... attract men

Men have the sexual and emotional sophistication of a dog. A whistle works well to start with, and then, when they've bounded over to you, rub their belly and they'll be yours for life. To maintain an optimum level of affection, make sure that they're regularly fed and occasionally given simple physical tasks, so they can assert their physical prowess. For the dog, this would be to fetch a stick; for a man, it would be to open a jam jar with a moderately stiff lid. Or you can test how keen your man is by seeing whether he'll fetch a stick.

Modern, enlightened man respects woman as his moral, economic and social equal, and the bigger her breasts are, the more respect she'll get. Breasts sympathetically arranged in an attractive display unit are sufficient to attract any man with a pulse. That's the good news. The bad news is that they will attract any man with a pulse. The difficult thing for a woman is to attract only men she finds attractive. Fortunately, when it comes to attracting a man, there are two powerful forces at work: a woman's body and a man's ego. Remember, a man's ego can be expanded to fill any deficiencies in a woman's appearance.

The key is to unlock the power of gratuitous flattery. So if you can keep a straight face and tell the average man something like, "You have a dangerously unsettling sexual aura", he will not only believe you immediately, but will believe it for the rest of his life, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Men project their energies and affections on to external things. A good way of attracting them is to flatter them on this external thing: take your pick from car, sound system, model railway, computer, shed, pigeon, medallion, yacht or todger.

Theoretically, men like pin-ups, but, practically, will settle for anything they can pin down. In fact, most men wouldn't know where to start when confronted with anything approaching a pin-up. Instead, men have a certain little something about women that they find irresistibly attractive.  You won't know you have this thing until you notice that the woman he leaves you for has the exact same thing as well.

Playing hard to get is a traditional way of pulling in a man. Some men love the thrill of the chase, and your role should be that of hunt saboteur, rather than just the fox. If a man has shown no initial interest, playing hard to get will just make you look very odd. And that's when you find yourself becoming strangely attractive to men who are also very odd.

How to... attract women

The vital criterion for being successful with women is rock-solid confidence. And the only way to get that is to be successful with women. Women have a deep, primal attraction to confidence, because it tells them that you'd go out and kill a mammoth if you had to; though some are attracted to anguished emotional cripples who can't commit, because they think that given time all this will change.  It won't, because that's how they attract women.

Women also like to have their own confidence boosted. You can do this by complimenting hair, weight, dress, eyes, shoes and clothing in any combination. For example: "Those new shoes go well with your excellent haircut" works well; "Your weight makes your shoes look big" doesn't.

Romance is important for women. Whisking her off to Paris is all very well, but it's only going through the motions. Romance is best when it's highly personal, intensely thoughtful, beautifully executed and a complete surprise. Ideally, a romantic gesture will include many, if not all, of the following: tissue paper, jewellery, keys, tickets, chocolate, baths, letters, thick white towelling dressing gowns.

Most women demand a good sense of humour in their man. Fortunately, most men develop a sense of humour because they have to deal with women. Be warned that women don't think belching the national anthem is funny.  They're not even impressed with Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. What they want is a man who doesn't take himself too seriously. In general, women don't take men seriously, so they won't make an exception for you.

If you've got rock-solid confidence and a great sense of humour, you don't need to be great-looking. Of course, women would prefer you had all three, but then you'd almost certainly be gay and they'd be back to square one.

What women do object to is embarrassing clothes. To a woman, you are basically a glorified accessory and it's therefore very important that you don't clash or jar in any way.

You can have all of the above and still be a profound disappointment to women if you are a sloppy kisser. Kissing is important to women, and shouldn't feel like you're rodding the drains or eating a watermelon. You should also concentrate on kissing, as it gives you extra foreplay points and will go some way to meeting that impossible foreplay target women set.

Being good at sex isn't going to help you with seducing women, because they're unlikely to take someone else's word for it and, by the time they find out you're rubbish, it's too late and the wedding guests have long gone.

********

For more of Guy Browning's How to series (Live Together, Be Content, Live, Die, Poach an Egg, Go With the Flow, Exercise, Eat Healthily, Cook Something Really Impressive, Be Beautiful, Pass the Time, Be Cool, Be Deep, Grow Up, Socialize, Go to a Party, Flirt, Be Suave, Be Good in Bed, and hundreds more) please click here.

20 November 2011

America appears to be the only country in the world where love is a national problem.


Love in America

"The problem of love in America seems to be the resultant of conflicting and rather unrealistic ways of approaching it.... It is as if the experience of being in love could only be one of two things: a superhuman ecstasy, the way of reaching heaven on earth and in pairs; or a psychopathic condition to be treated by specialists"
 
by Raoul De Roussy De Sales 
 

I
America appears to be the only country in the world where love is a national problem.

Nowhere else can one find a people devoting so much time and so much study to the question of the relationship between men and women. Nowhere else is there such concern about the fact that this relationship does not always make for perfect happiness. The great majority of the Americans of both sexes seem to be in a state of chronic bewilderment in the face of a problem which they are certainly not the first to confront, but which—unlike other people—they still refuse to accept as one of those gifts of the gods which one might just as well take as it is; a mixed blessing at times, and at other times a curse or merely a nuisance.

The prevailing conception of love, in America, is similar to the idea of democracy. It is fine in theory. It is the grandest system ever evolved by man to differentiate him from his ancestors, the poor brutes who lived in caverns, or from the apes. Love is perfect, in fact, and there is nothing better. But, like democracy, it does not work, and the Americans feel that something should be done about it. President Roosevelt is intent on making democracy work. Everybody is trying to make love work, too.

In either case the result is not very satisfactory. The probable reason is that democracy and love are products of a long and complicated series of compromises between the desires of the heart and the exactions of reason. They have a peculiar way of crumbling into ashes as soon as one tries too hard to organize them too well.

The secret of making a success out of democracy and love in their practical applications is to allow for a fairly wide margin of errors, and not to forget that human beings are absolutely unable to submit to a uniform rule for any length of time. But this does not satisfy a nation that, in spite of its devotion to pragmatism, also believes in perfection.

For a foreigner to speak of the difficulties that the Americans encounter in such an intimate aspect of their mutual relationship may appear as an impertinence. But the truth is that no foreigner would ever think of bringing up such a subject of his own accord. In fact, foreigners who come to these shores are quite unsuspecting of the existence of such a national problem. It is their initial observation that the percentage of good-looking women and handsome men is high on this continent, that they are youthful and healthy in mind and body, and that their outlook on life is rather optimistic.

If the newcomers have seen enough American moving pictures before landing here —and they usually have —they must have gathered the impression that love in America is normally triumphant, and that, in spite of many unfortunate accidents, a love story cannot but end very well indeed. They will have noticed that these love stories which are acted in Hollywood may portray quite regrettable situations at times and that blissful unions get wrecked by all sorts of misfortunes. But they never remain wrecked: even when the happy couple is compelled to divorce, this is not the end of everything. In most cases it is only the beginning. Very soon they will remarry, sometimes with one another, and always —without ever an exception —for love.

The observant foreigner knows, of course, that he cannot trust the movies to give him a really reliable picture of the American attitude towards love, marriage, divorce, and remarriage. But they nevertheless indicate that in such matters the popular mind likes to be entertained by the idea (1) that love is the only reason why a man and a woman should get married; (2) that love is always wholesome, genuine, uplifting, and fresh, like a glass of Grade A milk; (3) that when, for some reason or other, it fails to keep you uplifted, wholesome, and fresh, the only thing to do is to begin all over again with another partner.

Thus forewarned, the foreigner who lands on these shores would be very tactless indeed if he started questioning the validity of these premises. Besides, it is much more likely that he himself will feel thoroughly transformed the moment he takes his first stroll in the streets of New York. His European skepticism will evaporate a little more at each step, and if he considers himself not very young any more he will be immensely gratified to find that maturity and even old age are merely European habits of thought, and that he might just as well adopt the American method, which is to be young and act young for the rest of his life —or at least until the expiration of his visa.

If his hotel room is equipped with a radio, his impression that he has at last reached the land of eternal youth and perfect love will be confirmed at any hour of the day and on any point of the dial. No country in the world consumes such a fabulous amount of love songs. Whether the song is gay or nostalgic, the tune catchy or banal, the verses clever or silly, the theme is always love and nothing but love.

Whenever I go back to France and listen to the radio, I am always surprised to find that so many songs can be written on other subjects. I have no statistics on hand, but I think that a good 75 percent of the songs one hears on the French radio programmes deal with politics. There are love songs, of course, but most of them are far from romantic, and this is quite in keeping with the French point of view that love is very often an exceedingly comical affair.

In America the idea seems to be that love, like so much else, should be sold to the public, because it is a good thing. The very word, when heard indefinitely, becomes an obsession. It penetrates one's subconsciousness like the name of some unguent to cure heartaches or athlete's foot. It fits in with the other advertisements, and one feels tempted to write to the broadcasting station for a free sample of this thing called Love.

Thus the visitor from Europe is rapidly permeated with a delightful atmosphere of romanticism and sweetness. He wonders why Italy and Spain ever acquired their reputation of being the lands of romance. This, he says to himself, is the home of poetry and passion. The Americans are the real heirs of the troubadours, and station WXZQ is their love court.

To discover that all this ballyhoo about love (which is not confined to the radio or the movies) is nothing but an aspect of the national optimistic outlook on life does not take very long. It usually becomes evident when the foreign visitor receives the confidences of one or more of the charming American women he will chance to meet. This normally happens after the first or second cocktail party to which he has been invited.

II
I wish at this point to enter a plea in defense of the foreign visitor, against whom a great many accusations are often made either in print or in conversation. These accusations fall under two heads. If the foreigner seems to have no definite objective in visiting America, he is strongly suspected of trying to marry an heiress. If for any reason he cannot be suspected of this intention, then his alleged motives are considerably more sinister. Many American men, and quite a few women, believe that the art of wrecking a happy home is not indigenous to this continent, and that in Europe it has been perfected to such a point that to practise it has become a reflex with the visitors from abroad.

It is very true that some foreign visitors come over here to marry for money in exchange for a title or for some sort of glamour. But there are many more foreigners who marry American women for other reasons besides money, and I know quite a few who have become so Americanized that they actually have married for love and for nothing else.

As for the charge that the Europeans are more expert than the Americans in spoiling someone else's marital happiness, it seems to me an unfair accusation. In most cases the initiative of spoiling whatever it is that remains to be spoiled in a shaky marriage is normally taken by one of the married pair, and the wrecker of happiness does not need any special talent to finish the job.

What is quite true, however, is that the American woman entertains the delightful illusion that there must be some man on this earth who can understand her. It seems incredible to her that love, within legal bonds or outside of them, should not work out as advertised. From her earliest years she has been told that success is the ultimate aim of life. Her father and mother made an obvious success of their lives by creating her. Her husband is, or wants to be, a successful business man. Every day 130,000,000 people are panting and sweating to make a success of something or other. Success —the constant effort to make things work perfectly and the conviction that they can be made to —is the great national preoccupation.

And what does one do to make a success?

Well, the answer is very simple: one learns how, or one consults an expert.

That is what her husband does when he wants to invest his money or improve the efficiency of his business. That is what she did herself when she decided to 'decorate' her house. In the American way of life there are no insoluble problems. You may not know the answer yourself, but nobody doubts that the answer exists —that there is some method or perhaps some trick by which all riddles can be solved and success achieved.

And so the European visitor is put to the task on the presumption that the accumulation of experience which he brings with him may qualify him as an expert in questions of sentiment.

The American woman does not want to be understood for the mere fun of it. What she actually wishes is to be helped to solve certain difficulties which, in her judgment, impede the successful development of her inner self. She seldom accepts the idea that maladjustments and misunderstandings are not only normal but bearable once you have made up your mind that, whatever may be the ultimate aim of our earthly existence, perfect happiness through love or any other form of expression is not part of the programme.

One of the greatest moral revolutions that ever happened in America was the popularization of Freud's works.

III
Up to the time that occurred, as far as I am able to judge, America lived in a blissful state of puritanical repression. Love, as a sentiment, was glorified sanctified by marriage. There was a general impression that some sort of connection existed between the sexual impulses and the vagaries of the heart, but this connection was not emphasized, and the consensus of opinion was that the less said about it the better. The way certain nations, and particularly the French, correlated the physical manifestations of love and its more spiritual aspects was considered particularly objectionable. Love, in other words, and that was not very long ago, had not changed since the contrary efforts of the puritanically-minded and the romantic had finally stabilized it midway between the sublime and the parlor game.

The important point is that up to then (and ever since the first Pilgrims set foot on this continent) love had been set aside in the general scheme of American life as the one thing which could not be made to work better than it did. Each one had to cope with his own difficulties in his own way and solve them as privately as he could. It was not a national problem.

Whether or not people were happier under that system is beside the point. It probably does not matter very much whether we live and die with or without a full set of childish complexes and repressions. My own view is that most people are neither complex nor repressed enough as a rule; I wish sometimes for the coming of the Anti-Freud who will complicate and obscure everything again.

But the fact is that the revelations of psychoanalysis were greeted in America as the one missing link in the general programme of universal improvement.

Here was a system, at last, that explained fully why love remained so imperfect. It reduced the whole dilemma of happiness to sexual maladjustments, which in turn were only the result of the mistakes made by one's father, mother, or nurse, at an age when one could certainly not be expected to foresee the consequences. Psychoanalysis integrated human emotions into a set of mechanistic formulas. One learned with great relief that the failure to find happiness was not irreparable. Love, as a sublime communion of souls and bodies, was not a legend, nor the mere fancy of the poets. It was real, and —more important still —practically attainable. Anybody could have it, merely by removing a few obstructions which had been growing within himself since childhood like mushrooms in a dark cellar. Love could be made to work like anything else.

It is true that not many people are interested in psychoanalysis any more. As a fad or a parlor game, it is dead. Modern debutantes will not know what you are talking about if you mention the Oedipus complex or refer to the symbolic meaning of umbrellas and top hats in dreams. Traditions die young these days. But the profound effect of the Freudian revelation has lasted. From its materialistic interpretation of sexual impulses, coupled with the American longing for moral perfection, a new science has been born: the dialectics of love; and also a new urge for the American people —they want to turn out, eventually, a perfect product. They want to get out of love as much enjoyment, comfort, safety, and general sense of satisfaction, as one gets out of a well-balanced diet or a good plumbing installation.

IV
Curiously enough, this fairly new point of view which implies that human relationships are governed by scientific laws has not destroyed the romantic ideal of love. Quite the contrary. Maladjustments, now that they are supposed to be scientifically determined, have become much more unbearable than in the horse-and-buggy age of love. Husbands and wives and lovers have no patience with their troubles. They want to be cured, and when they think they are incurable they become very intolerant. Reformers always are.

Usually, however, various attempts at readjustment are made with devastating candor. Married couples seem to spend many precious hours of the day and night discussing what is wrong with their relationship. The general idea is that —according to the teachings of most modern psychologists and pedagogues —one should face the truth fearlessly. Husbands and wives should be absolutely frank with one another, on the assumption that if love between them is real it will be made stronger and more real still if submitted, at frequent intervals, to the test of complete sincerity on both sides.

This is a fine theory, but it has seldom been practised without disastrous results. There are several reasons why this should be so. First of all, truth is an explosive, and it should be handled with care, especially in marital life. It is not necessary to lie, but there is little profit in juggling with hand grenades just to show how brave one is. Secondly, the theory of absolute sincerity presupposes that if love cannot withstand continuous blasting, then it is not worth saving anyway. Some people want their love life to be a permanent battle of Verdun. When the system of defense is destroyed beyond repair, then the clause of hopeless maladjustment is invoked by one side, or by both. The next thing to do is to divorce and find someone else to be recklessly frank with for a season.

Another reason why the method of adjustment through truth-telling is not always wise is that it develops fiendish traits of character which might otherwise remain dormant.

I know a woman whose eyes glitter with virtuous self-satisfaction every time she has had a 'real heart-to-heart talk' with her husband, which means that she has spent several hours torturing him, or at best boring him to distraction, with a ruthless exposure of the deplorable status of their mutual relationship to date. She is usually so pleased with herself after these periodical inquests that she tells most of her friends, and also her coiffeur, about it. 'Dick and I had such a wonderful time last evening. We made a real effort to find out the real truth about each other —or, at least, I certainly did. I honestly believe we have found a new basis of adjustment for ourselves. What a marvelous feeling that is —don't you think so?'

Dick, of course, if he happens to be present, looks rather nervous or glum, but that is not the point. The point is that Dick's wife feels all aglow because she has done her bit in the general campaign for the improvement of marital happiness through truth. She has been a good girl scout.

A man of my acquaintance, who believes in experimenting outside of wedlock, is unable to understand why his wife would rather ignore his experiments. 'If I did not love her and if she did not love me,' he argues, 'I could accept her point of view. But why can't she see that the very fact that I want her to know everything I do is a proof that I love her? If I have to deceive her or conceal things from her, what is the use of being married to her?'

Be it said, in passing, that this unfortunate husband believes that these extramarital 'experiments' are absolutely necessary to prevent him from developing a sense of inferiority, which, if allowed to grow, would destroy not only the love he has for his wife, but also his general ability in his dealings with the outside world.

V
The difference between an American cookbook and a French one is that the former is very accurate and the second exceedingly vague. A French recipe seldom tells you how many ounces of butter to use to make crêpes Suzette, or how many spoonfuls of oil should go into a salad dressing. French cookbooks are full of esoteric measurements such as a pinch of pepper, a suspicion of garlic, or a generous sprinkling of brandy. There are constant references to seasoning to taste, as if the recipe were merely intended to give a general direction, relying on the experience and innate art of the cook to make the dish turn out right.

American recipes look like doctors' prescriptions. Perfect cooking seems to depend on perfect dosage. Some of these books give you a table of calories and vitamins —as if that had anything to do with the problem of eating well!

In the same way, there is now flourishing in America a great crop of books which offer precise recipes for the things you should do, or avoid doing, in order to achieve happiness and keep the fires of love at a constant temperature. In a recent issue of Time magazine, four such books were reviewed together. Their titles are descriptive enough of the purpose of the authors as well as the state of mind of the readers: Love and Happiness, So You're Going to Get Married, Marriages Are Made at Home, Getting Along Together.

I have not read all these books, but, according to the reviewer, they all tend to give practical answers to the same mysterious problem of living with someone of the opposite sex. They try to establish sets of little rules and little tricks which will guarantee marital bliss if carefully followed, in the same way that cookbooks guarantee that you will obtain pumpkin pie if you use the proper ingredients properly measured.

As the publisher of one of these books says on the jacket: 'There is nothing in this book about the complicated psychological problems that send men and women to psychoanalysts, but there is a lot in it about the little incidents of daily married life —the things that happen in the parlor, bedroom and bath —that handled one way enable people to live together happily forever after, and handled another way lead to Reno.'

Time's review of these books is very gloomy in its conclusion: 'Despite their optimistic tone,' it says, 'the four volumes give a troubled picture of United States domestic life —a world in which husbands are amorous when wives are not, and vice versa; where conflicts spring up over reading in bed or rumpling the evening paper . . . the whole grim panorama giving the impression that Americans are irritable, aggravated, dissatisfied people for whom marriage is an ordeal that only heroes and heroines can bear.'

But I believe that the editors of Time would be just as dejected if they were reviewing four volumes about American cooking, and for the same reasons, You cannot possibly feel cheerful when you see the art of love or the art of eating thus reduced to such automatic formulas, oven if the experts in these matters are themselves cheerful and optimistic. Good food, the pleasures of love, and those of marriage depend on imponderables, individual taste, and no small amount of luck.

VI
Thus the problem of love in America seems to be the resultant of conflicting and rather unrealistic ways of approaching it. Too many songs, too many stories, too many pictures, and too much romance on the one hand, and too much practical advice on the other. It is as if the experience of being in love could only be one of two things: a superhuman ecstasy, the way of reaching heaven on earth and in pairs; or a psychopathic condition to be treated by specialists.

Between these two extremes there is little room for compromise. That the relationship between men and women offers a wide scale of variations seldom occurs to the experts. It is not necessarily true that there is but one form of love worth bothering about, and that if you cannot get the deluxe model, with a life guarantee of perfect functioning, nothing else is worth-while. It is not true either that you can indefinitely pursue the same quest for perfection, or that if a man and a woman have not found ideal happiness together they will certainly find it with somebody else. Life unfortunately does not begin at forty, and when you reach that age, in America or anywhere else, to go on complaining about your sentimental or physiological maladjustments becomes slightly farcical.

It is not easy, nor perhaps of any use, to draw any conclusion from all this, especially for a European who has lost the fresh point of view of the visitor because he lives here, and who is not quite sure of what it means to be a European any more. I sometimes wonder if there is any real difference between the way men and women get along —or do not get along —together on this side of the Atlantic and on the other. There are probably no more real troubles here than anywhere else. Human nature being quite remarkably stable, why should there be? But there is no doubt that the revolt against this type of human inadequacy is very strong indeed here, especially among the women who imagine that the Europeans have found better ways of managing their heart and their senses than the Americans.

If this is at all true, I believe the reason is to be found in a more philosophical attitude on the part of the Europeans towards such matters. There are no theories about marital bliss, no recipes to teach you how to solve difficulties which, in the Old World, are accepted as part of the common inheritance.

Men and women naturally want to be happy over there, and, if possible, with the help of one another; but they learn very young that compromise is not synonymous with defeat. Even in school (I am speaking more particularly of France now) they are taught, through the literature of centuries, that love is a phenomenon susceptible of innumerable variations, but that —even under the best circumstances —it is so intertwined with the other experiences of each individual life that to be overromantic or too dogmatic about it is of little practical use. 'La vérité est dans les nuances,' wrote Benjamin Constant, who knew a good deal about such matters.

And, speaking of the truly practical and realistic nature of love, it is a very strange thing that American literature contains no work of any note, not even essays, on love as a psychological phenomenon. I know of no good study of the process of falling in and out of love, no analytical description of jealousy, coquettishness, or the development of tediousness. No classification of the various brands of love such as La Rochefoucauld, Pascal, Stendhal, Proust, and many others have elaborated has been attempted from the American angle. The interesting combinations of such passions as ambition, jealousy, religious fervor, and so forth, with love are only dimly perceived by most people and even by the novelists, who, with very few exceptions, seem to ignore or scorn these complicated patterns. These fine studies have been left to the psychiatrists, the charlatans, or the manufacturers of naive recipes.

The reason for this neglect on the part of real thinkers and essayists may be that for a long time the standards imposed by the puritanical point of view made the whole study more or less taboo with respectable authors. And then the Freudian wave came along and carried the whole problem out of reach of the amateur observer and the artist. In other words, conditions have been such that there has been no occasion to fill this curious gap in American literature.

Of course, nothing is lost. The field remains open, and there is no reason to suppose that love in America will not cease to be a national problem, a hunting ground for the reformer, and that it will not become, as everywhere else, a personal affair very much worth the effort it takes to examine it as such. All that is necessary is for someone to forget for a while love as Hollywood —or the professor —sees it, and sit down and think about it as an eternally fascinating subject for purely human observation.




Copyright © 1938 by Raoul De Roussy De Sales. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; Volume 161, No. 5; pp. 645-651.

Why The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and other books on self-help, positive thinking, and homegrown theories of “excellence” are bad for you.

Required Reading

by Thomas Frank

Harper’s Magazine Easy Chair (June 2011)

Omar Khadr is a prisoner at Guantanamo who pleaded guilty last year to killing an American soldier in Afghanistan in 2002. His case was controversial because he was captured on the battlefield at age fifteen, making him a child soldier and therefore, by the conventional thinking on these matters, not responsible for his actions. His case has also drawn international attention because he is a Canadian citizen, and because allegations of torture have surfaced on several occasions. To make things even more fraught, there is his family background: Omar is the son of Ahmed Khadr, a well-known Al Qaeda fundraiser who was killed in a shootout with Pakistani security forces in 2003.

Thanks to a plea bargain, Omar Khadr will serve only eight more years behind bars, and most of those will probably be in Canada. In preparation for his eventual repatriation and release, his defense attorneys have been providing him with educational materials in order to bring him up to speed with his peer group. The texts deemed necessary for his reentry into Canadian society include Romeo and Juliet and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006).

Meanwhile, according to people familiar with Khadr’s case, American law-enforcement personnel have recommended a very different curriculum to ease his return to civil society. His required reading: Stephen R Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (1989).

I was unable to get those law-enforcement people to confirm or deny assigning Khadr the book. It is, we know, a popular item in the Guantanamo prison library, along with the Harry Potter series and various other titles chosen for their lack of graphic violence, sexual content, or descriptions of potential terrorist targets. Indeed, according to a Defense Department spokesperson, “approximately half of the [prison] population” has read Covey’s book.

Khadr is definitely among them. And regardless of whether it was assigned to him or not, I was struck by the idea of a Guantanamo prisoner reading one of the best-known titles in American management literature. In the genre of prison favorites, one thinks of Soul on Ice (1968) or In the Belly of the Beast (1981). But here we have a prisoner in one of the nation’s harshest lockups teaching himself to set goals, be proactive, and care about others. What use would a man living in such a place have for “win/win solutions” or “empathic listening”? And why, I wondered, would our government encourage a man many believe to be a terrorist to read a book that promises to make him more “effective”?

One obvious answer suggests itself: the process of “deradicalization”, which has so often been discussed in connection with Guantanamo detainees. In most cases, deradicalization is supposed to involve religious instruction emphasizing peacefulness, often administered by an Islamic cleric. But perhaps our counterterrorism strategists have discovered a secular counterpart for this exercise.

Just last year, in fact, Stephen Covey’s company, FranklinCovey, issued a monograph describing the book’s potential role in reforming incarcerated criminals. Once upon a time, it tells us, most prison reform programs were “faith-based”. Now the idea is to build them upon the rock of managerial science: prisoners will thereby learn valuable techniques for relating nonviolently to others, and after their release, they can discuss their “acquisition of a new mindset” with “a prospective employer”, presumably one familiar with Covey’s self-ameliorating gospel.

Should you peruse federal contracting databases, you will also find that FranklinCovey does a brisk business with the departments of Defense, State, and Homeland Security. It doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch to wonder whether a DOD bureaucrat, at some FranklinCovey seminar over the past few years, decided that The Seven Habits would make an ideal twelve-step program to a jihad-free life.


Just for fun, let’s take as our hypothesis that The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is being used as a device for deradicalization – that it is seen, in some quarters, as a means to neutralize the nation’s enemies, to teach them the folly of their ways. It would not be the first time the United States used books for such purposes. During the Cold War, literature was constantly deployed to show the world that we were a people of taste and freedom and vanguardish ebullience, not the greedy philistines some imagined. The CIA-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom operated in thirty-five countries, and underwrote intellectual journals in Britain, Australia, France, Brazil, Mexico, and the Philippines. What’s more, the literary weapons of those days often bore the patina of genius. Say what you like about such deradicalizing artifacts as the 1950 anticommunist anthology The God That Failed, which was distributed far and wide courtesy of the CCF. At least it featured writing by people like Arthur Koestler, Richard Wright, Stephen Spender, and Andre Gide.

Today the Congress for Cultural Freedom is long gone. The public diplomacy that has taken its place is not a subtle thing. It is a matter of branding and spin and one blunder after another. In the years after the 9/11 attacks, when we launched various initiatives to counter the anti-American sentiment that was reported to be ubiquitous in the Muslim world, the top job went to a series of PR people and veterans of Madison Avenue – most infamously Karen Hughes, a woman who spoke no Arabic and who committed a memorable series of gaffes overseas. She was followed in the post by James K Glassman, the coauthor of Dow 36,000 (1999).

But if The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is to be our generation’s God That Failed – the stealth device that’s supposed to defuse the hate and suspicion of the world, one reader at a time – I fear that things may be even worse than this sorry record of public diplomacy suggests. Consider, for starters, exactly who is reading Covey’s text at Guantanamo. Omar Khadr is twenty-four years old. Were he to draft his resume, it would reveal that he spent the last nine of those years in prison cells of varying degrees of wretchedness. Before that, he absorbed a course of intensive instruction in a fundamentalist movement that is deeply unpopular in the US, and then picked a fight with the strongest military in the world in some awful corner of a desolate and impoverished land.

The Seven Habits, meanwhile, is a book written for Americans who feel that their present contribution to the planet’s richest economy is not quite fulfilling enough. It is a handbook for senior executives suffering anomie as they cruise gated communities in their purring BMWs – and for junior executives who don’t yet have that BMW, but want to work their way up from the Camry they currently drive.

To dampen the ardor of the most alienated people on earth, then, we have chosen an unusual tactic: management theory. It would be hard to imagine a less suitable offering for the target audience. Maybe if they required Guantanamo inmates to read Wuthering Heights (1846)? A biography of William Randolph Hearst? Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1967)?

Think about it this way and the episode begins to seem like another depressing benchmark in the triumph of the banal. The part of American life that The Seven Habits represents – the culture of self-help, positive thinking, and homegrown theories of “excellence” – is precisely the face we tried to conceal during the Cold War.

Then again, I could be wrong. Perhaps the officials who are reportedly walking Khadr through Covey’s book know precisely what they’re doing. Perhaps there’s a method to their motivating. To figure it out, I sat down and read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, looking for clues to its usefulness in fighting the Global War on Terror, or at least in helping to deradicalize suspected terrorists.

Covey announces early on that his work is the culmination of his study of American “success literature”. But his method is really to formalize, with an amazing fastidiousness, traditional bits of business folklore, organizing them with numbers, charts, and important-sounding category titles. He tells us about the “four life-support factors”, the four “quadrants” of the “time management matrix”, the five “ingredients” of a “good affirmation”, and the various “generations” of time management (and of these, please note that “the fourth generation of self-management is more advanced than the third in five important ways”).

You or I might laugh at such hokey pseudoscience. To prisoners who know little about the Western world, however, a book that identifies the “six paradigms of human interaction” might sound downright authoritative. Maybe, they will think, this book really is a philosophical treatise in the grandest sense: a handbook for human existence, not merely a self-improvement guide for troubled bosses.

That’s certainly what it claims to be. In a 2004 foreword, Covey asserts that the “solutions” he proposes are “based upon universal, timeless, self-evident principles common to every enduring, prospering society throughout history”. They are applicable everywhere and in every historical epoch. Much is made of “natural law” and the attunement of the title’s “seven habits” to said law. Then there are the “personal mission statements” the book encourages us to write, which are small-scale versions of the US Constitution. After all, notes Covey, that document also lacks any sort of expiration date:
The Constitution has endured and serves its vital function today because it is based on correct principles, on the self-evident truths contained in the Declaration of Independence. These principles empower the Constitution with a timeless strength, even in the midst of social ambiguity and change.
Now, wiseacres like you and I might think that such universal claims would limit the value of The Seven Habits in any sort of propaganda campaign. Surely they would ring false to readers not already convinced of the overwhelming superiority of the US Constitution. And what would such readers think of the suggestion that the answers to the great problems of mankind are to be found through a study of the triumphs and travails of American businesspeople?

But, again, that would be missing the point. The Seven Habits is a book with a worldwide presence; the FranklinCovey website lists offices in every region of the globe, from which its hordes of consultants fan out and “enable greatness” among the local business class. The book has been translated into thirty-eight languages and hit the bestseller list in South Korea, Japan, and (predominantly Muslim) Malaysia. On YouTube, Indonesian schoolchildren can be seen singing a simplified version of its precepts. Apparently the text’s thorough Americanness is no handicap at all. On the contrary: it is the deradicalizing payload smuggled in under the sweet fog of self-help.

Come to think of it, maybe The Seven Habits would make a good propaganda vehicle after all. It promises to help you “change”, to make you successful, but the changes it suggests largely aim to bring you into conformity with American business practice. You are what needs to change, not the world.

This is not a premise unique to The Seven Habits, of course. Inducing acquiescence is the object of nearly all modern management literature. The genre exists to persuade the world that the market is a benevolent deity, that the corporation is its worthy representative here on earth, and that the sooner you understand that, the better.

Let’s recall, in this connection, that management favorite of the 1990s, Who Moved My Cheese? (1998). It was, I thought, a parable of worker powerlessness before the market deity, that invisible cheese-moving hand. The course of wisdom, the book taught, was for us to submit to the ineffable makers of “change”, even though they “moved” our “cheese” hither and yon. To question those powers, as in the book’s title, was to brand yourself a recalcitrant good-for-nothing. Managers everywhere bought the thing in bulk and required their workers to read it, and for good reason: it was a weapon of class war.

And so is The Seven Habits, albeit in a friendlier and far more palatable form. It, too, is a book about “change” – but again, the change is all on you. The ways of the economy, remember, are fixed, natural, and eternal; it is up to us to bring ourselves into “harmony” with them, to “rescript” ourselves. “Anytime we think the problem is ‘out there‘”, Covey writes, “that thought is the problem“. Don’t concern yourself with external conditions – like, say, your indefinite detention on a tropical island not of your choosing. {*} Concern yourself with how you think about external conditions.
__________
{*} Imprisonment is a recurring theme in The Seven Habits. Two of the book’s most memorable stories come from prison memoirs, in which convicts learn important lessons about themselves while incarcerated. Then there is the woman in the audience at a Covey lecture who tells him that his wisdom made her feel “as though I was being let out of San Quentin”.
__________
It is a technique for autohypnosis, a guidebook for remaking ourselves in a manner more analogous to the universal “human consciousness” that Covey has somehow divined. And so from our desire for self-improvement comes a form of meekness, comes submersion in the team.

But suppose the Guantanamo detainees don’t buy it. Suppose they’re precisely the canny Al Qaeda operatives many pundits believe them to be, and that they’re wise to our government and its literary ploys. Suppose the book’s powers of deradicalization aren’t as great as they seem. Suppose the prisoners are pretending to internalize the book’s hyper-Americanness and its message of “change”, but are in fact paying attention only to the parts about managing your time better and “sharpening the saw”.

Then we would have achieved the exact opposite of deradicalization. We would have filled dangerous people with all sorts of useful tips for making even more mischief than before. We would have created a bunch of highly effective jihadis.

It’s happened before. One self-described fan of The Seven Habits was the deceased Saudi businessman Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, a brother-in-law of Osama bin Laden who was suspected of having established the Al Qaeda beachhead in the Philippines. Here was a man who seems to have been highly effective indeed, but who clearly cared little for the universal principles of the US Constitution and the US business class.

I started this essay bemoaning the decline of American propaganda from highbrow to middlebrow, but maybe the best solution is to sink all the way to the bottom of the taste hierarchy. Maybe we haven’t gotten banal enough. Maybe, to win this war, the ugly American needs to do his stuff.

What the Guantanamo inmates need to learn, then, is the opposite of effectiveness. They need to become lazy and self-indulgent. They need to grasp the pointlessness of getting things done. They need to become American-style consumers, not American-style executives – and least of all American-style aesthetes.

Let us outfit every cell at Guantanamo with a recliner and the full universe of cable TV, including Spice Platinum. Set each prisoner up with a Snuggie, a crate of Hot Pockets, and Grand Theft Auto. Their curriculum will be limited to a single habit, one that comes naturally in our culture: take it easy, do what feels good, and remember, it’s always someone else’s problem.

Is Science more moral than Religion?

Atheism’s Poster Boy Sam Harris on the Science of Morality

 Photograph: Peter Yang
Photograph: Peter Yang

If there is a hell, Sam Harris—author of The End of Faith and atheism’s poster boy—is going there. But while the faithful may argue that godless scientists are doomed to soul-destroying nihilism, Harris’ new book, The Moral Landscape, attempts to redeem the science-based worldview, arguing that it offers a clearer path to morality. Wired called Harris—from out of lightning-bolt range—to discuss his argument.

What do you mean by “moral landscape”?
It’s a framework in which we can talk about the most important questions in scientific terms—questions that relate to human and animal well-being. For instance, we in the developed world have a different notion about how to live a long and healthy life. That’s because we have a science of medicine, which gives us an understanding of the mechanics of disease processes and how to address them.

How can you scientifically determine whether something is good or bad?
The science of morality is about maximizing psychological and social health. It’s really no more inflammatory than that. Obviously it would be a good thing to stop nuclear proliferation and genocide and climate change, and to better educate our children. These are things that would be good for everybody and bad for nobody. People seem to believe that there’s no ground for truth-claims about human values—that these are not the sort of facts that science can ever deal with. But there is a place for science to argue, for instance, that the Taliban is really wrong. Its beliefs lead to unnecessary human suffering. Any conception of human well-being you could plausibly have, the Taliban patently fails to maximize it.

Religion makes those sort of truth-claims all the time.
But religion is precisely the wrong software for analyzing human well-being. It’s the one area of our lives where people win points for saying, “I’m not going to change my mind no matter what happens.”

But hasn’t religion made some people behave more morally?
The problem is that religion tends to give people bad reasons to be good. Is it better to alleviate famine in Africa because you think Jesus Christ is watching and deciding whether to reward you with an eternity of happiness after death? Or is it better to do that because you actually care about the suffering of your fellow human beings?

Why is science a better alternative?
Science is the most durable and nondivisive way of thinking about the human circumstance. It transcends cultural, national, and political boundaries. You don’t have American science versus Canadian science versus Japanese science.

Science has suffered when it’s seen as the enemy of religion. But in your book you criticize scientists who have tried to build bridges.
A religious scientist is someone who has decided he can behave rigorously in his scientific profession but has no obligation to connect that way of thinking to his larger worldview. If he did, he would notice contradictions between his science and his religion. Besides, the point is not to get religious people to accept evolution—it’s to get everyone thinking honestly about the nature of the world.

A lot of people must hate what you’re saying. Do you worry about your personal safety? 
I take security seriously, and I’ve gotten my share of weird emails. I don’t tell people where I live.

How to teach kids to play bridge

Louis Sachar's card-playing obsession

In 'The Cardturner,' the bestselling author of "Holes" turns to one of his favorite games: bridge.

May 07, 2010|By Sonja Bolle, Special to the Los Angeles Times

Isn't it thrilling when your favorite author writes a novel about his secret passion?

Louis Sachar, author of the children's classic "Holes," among many other beloved books, now brings us a novel about …playing cards. Playing bridge, to be specific. It turns out he's a complete bridge freak.

Bo-ring!

You can imagine the first conversation he had with his agent about this novel: "But kids love my books! They'll be with me every step of the way!"

No, I'm sure he never said that. One of the great things about Sachar's writing is his modesty. Don't imagine for a moment that he didn't consider the difficulty of making this subject gripping to 14-year-olds. He pretty much admits this in "The Cardturner" (Delacorte: $17.99, ages 12 and up) when he has the narrator's best friend, Cliff, say that "bridge was a card game little old ladies played while eating chocolate-covered raisins."

Alton Richards is a high school student faced with a bad summer. He has to get a job, but he's daunted by the prospect of visiting all those dull places and filling out all those dull applications. His girlfriend has left him, and she didn't just break up with him; she kind of sidled off with his best friend, the aforementioned Cliff. While Alton spends a lot of time brooding over it, he never quite knows what he was supposed to say about it and mostly spends time trying to stay friends with Cliff while avoiding Katie.

Then his mother signs him up to drive his blind great-uncle to his bridge club, hoping the rich old man will solve the family's money troubles. "Tell him he's your favorite uncle!" she hisses at Alton when he's talking to Uncle Lester on the phone.

It doesn't look like a promising story.

But of course, this being Louis Sachar in the driver's seat, he gets you. First of all, there's the modesty: In case you don't want to learn every little thing about bridge, he signals when he's about to go into a long, technical explanation by slipping in a little picture of a whale. This is a reference to "Moby Dick" and its passages about whaling, which many readers skip, while the cool readers know that's where the meat really is. (OK, modesty is a two-edged sword, one side being the blade that disarms you with the aw-shucks cut, the other being the one that bears down on you whistling, "I'm really like the genius Herman Melville!" At another time, we could do a whole essay on modesty and vanity.)

"If I were a super-talented author," Sachar writes, "you'd no doubt feel the suspense as I described the evening session to you, hand after hand, card after card. When I got to the part where Trapp and Gloria were playing against the pair with the 66 percent game, the tension would be so great, wax would ooze out your ears, no matter how many tiny hairs you have in there. But I'm not."

Trust me, though, by Page 254, when he's describing the feeling in the room in which the national bridge championship is being held, it's electric. You could be at Game 7 of the World Series. You'll be avidly devouring the whale parts as well as the quick summaries he puts in boxes to make you laugh. You'll be feeling pretty smart, and you'll be thinking: "I wonder if I could learn to play bridge, without my friends finding out and thinking I'm a dork."

Bridge sounds amazingly cool. The more Alton learns about the game, the more he thinks Trapp — which is what he quickly starts calling his Uncle Lester — is the most awesome dude on Earth. The intense relationship between bridge partners, the unbelievable high they get from communicating silently and solving difficult puzzles; no wonder all those old people blow through marriages but hang on to bridge partners. That's where the juice is!

Then, in another Sachar touch, the really cool stuff just sneaks up on you. Suddenly, on Page 236, you, the reader, wake up like Dorothy with Toto in your arms, and realize you're not in Kansas anymore. The story has taken a bizarre turn — let me just say ghosts might be involved — and you remember why "Holes" was not just a novel about loser kids in a dusty work camp.

One of the great moments in life is when you discover that you're not the first person ever to experience the big things — heartbreak, for example. In fact, like the two-edged sword of modesty, experiencing the misery of heartbreak actually puts you, thrillingly, in a line with all the greats who've been there before, maybe even starting with your great-uncle.

How to balance your pool water

 Bobby. Mel, Ramon Birthday Party, Pasadena, July 17 2010

 

Langelier Saturation Index Calculator

This calculator requires the use of Javascript enabled and capable browsers. This script determines water balance calculations. Once you have measured the various parameters below, you can use this convenient Langelier Saturation Index calculator to determine whether your water is corrosive, scale forming or nicely balanced. If the water is corrosive, the water will try to saturate itself by dissolving the surface composition structure of your pool. If it is scale forming it will try to correct its over saturation by precipitating the hard water salts causing cloudy water and eventually deposit scale on pool components.

Saturation Index = pH + calchd + totak + tmpc - 12.1

In the above formula:
calchd is the Calcium Hardness factor. Optimum range 75 to 150 mg/liter.
totak is the Total Alkalinity factor. Optimum range 100 to 150 mg/liter.
tmpc is the Temperature in Degrees Centigrade. Suggested water temperature is between 27 and 29.5 Degrees C in commercial pools.
pH. Optimum range 7.2 to 7.6.

If the result of this calculation is zero, the target goal, then the water is balanced. If the answer is less than 0, the water leans toward being corrosive. If it is greater than 0, then it is indicative of scale forming. An acceptable range is -0.5 to +0.5, with the optimum goal of 0 (zero). If the result is outside this range, adjustments should be made to the hardness, alkalinity and pH to bring it as close to zero as possible and ideally within the optimum ranges shown above. Be aware however, that while the water may be balanced from a corrosion and scaling point of view it does not necessarily mean that it is ideal for chemical efficiency and bather comfort.

We Real Cool, a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks

We Real Cool

By Gwendolyn Brooks
The Pool Players.
Seven at the Golden Shovel.
We real cool. We   
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We   
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We   
Die soon.

After Making Love, a poem by Stephen Dunn

AFTER MAKING LOVE - Stephen Dunn


No one should ask the other,
"What were you thinking?"

No one, that is,
who doesn't want to hear about the past

and its inhabitants,
or the strange loneliness of the present

filled, even as it may be, with pleasure
or those snapshots

of the future, different heads,
on different bodies.

Some people actually desire honesty.
They must never have broken

ino their own solitary houses
after having misplaced the key,

never seen with an intruder's eyes
what is theirs.


 

anyone lived in a pretty how town, a poem by e e cummings

 

anyone lived in a pretty how town by e e cummings


anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn't he danced his did.

Women and men (both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn't they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain

children guessed (but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew
autumn winter spring summer)
that noone loved him more by more

when by now and tree by leaf
she laughed his joy she cried his grief
bird by snow and stir by still
anyone's any was all to her

someones married their everyones
laughed their cryings and did their dance
(sleep wake hope and then)they
said their nevers they slept their dream

stars rain sun moon
(and only the snow can begin to explain
how children are apt to forget to remember
with up so floating many bells down)

one day anyone died i guess
(and noone stooped to kiss his face)
busy folk buried them side by side
little by little and was by was

all by all and deep by deep
and more by more they dream their sleep
noone and anyone earth by april
with by spirit and if by yes.

Women and men (both dong and ding)
summer autumn winter spring
reaped their sowing and went their came
sun moon stars rain

Patience, a poem by Kay Ryan

Patience

Patience is
wider than one
once envisioned,
with ribbons
of rivers
and distant
ranges and
tasks undertaken
and finished
with modest
relish by
natives in their
native dress.
Who would
have guessed
it possible
that waiting
is sustainable—
a place with
its own harvests.
Or that in
time's fullness
the diamonds
of patience
couldn't be
distinguished
from the genuine
in brilliance
or hardness.

One Art, a poem by Elizabeth Bishop




One Art  
by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant 
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.


--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied.  It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Résumé, a poem by Dorothy Parker



'Resume'

Razors pain you; 
Rivers are damp; 
Acids stain you; 
And drugs cause cramp; 
Guns aren't lawful; 
Nooses give; 
Gas smells awful; 
You might as well live. 

Dorothy Parker

How to make Affogato - vanilla ice cream "drowned" in espresso.

Critic S. Irene Virbila cools it with an affogato

Affogato (1 of 1) When Alto Palato, the late great West Hollywood Italian restaurant was still open and I lived around the corner, on hot summer days when the ceiling fan just wasn’t cutting it, I would sometimes slip over to the restaurant’s bar for an affogato. That would be ice cream "drowned" in espresso.

Gino Rendoni, longtime manager at Angelini Osteria, was the barista then. At the time, Alto Palato was practically the only place to get a good espresso. (L.A. has come a long, long way since those days.) And an affogato made with his espresso was superb.

Now I sometimes make it at home. The first requirement is a good vanilla gelato or ice cream. Don’t even think about using other flavors. Sometimes I have some I’ve made leftover, or if not, I’ll go with Ben & Jerry’s basic or Dr. Bob's vanilla. Put a scoop in a cup or small bowl and pour freshly made espresso over the top--not too much or the ice cream will melt under the onslaught, about the equivalent of a short espresso.

 That’s it. Consume immediately.

Photo credit: S. Irene Virbila/Los Angeles Times

How to let your loved ones know that you are safe and well after a disaster.

When Affected, Get Connected

1. Visit redcross.org/safeandwell

2. Register yourself as "safe and well"

3. Search for your loved ones' posted messages

My son is really cute now and other jokes from biochemist Joe Wong


Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times

"I have a family now, but I used to be really scared about marriage. I was like, wow, 50% of all marriages end up lasting forever."

"Now I have a sign on my car that says 'Baby on Board.' This sign is basically a threat. It just says I have a screaming baby, a nagging wife and I'm not afraid of dying anymore."

"Are you guys worried about the economy? I'm not, 'cause I grew up poor, you know. If I become poor again, I'll just feel young."

"My son is really cute now, but when he was first born, he was ugly. And I wasn't prepared for it, you know. I was looking at him at the delivery room and trying to remember some of my ugly relatives — and to decide exactly who passed the ugly gene to my son, you know. And the doctor came in, he was like, 'Wow, congratulations! He looks just like you!'"

"In order for me to become a U.S. citizen, I had to take these American history lessons, where they asked us questions like, 'Who is Benjamin Franklin?'

"I was like, 'Uh, the reason our convenience store gets robbed?'

"'What's the 2nd Amendment?'

"I was like, 'Uh, the reason our convenience store gets robbed?'

"'What is Roe vs. Wade?' I was like, 'Uh, two ways of coming to the United States?'"