Tag: memory

Sister Marcia, the convener

old movies

Marcia.covid shotMy sister Marcia was asking that the family, i.e., my sister Leslie, she, and I – meet online on a regular basis for years. And years.

She wanted to use Skype or some such. As I vaguely recall, I found that platform unnecessarily wonky, and so… I didn’t say No, and I actually downloaded the software. MAYBE we used it once or twice, but I didn’t like it.

But as the saying goes, it takes a pandemic. The three of us have met almost every week for a year on ZOOM. Occasionally, we’ll get guest participants such as my wife or Marcia’s daughter. We pretty much fill two 40-minute slots. (Longer than that and I develop brain fog.)

Currently, she’s working on pricing a headstone for our maternal grandmother Gertrude (Yates) Williams, who died in 1982, and her sister Adenia Yates, who passed in 1966. Why my parents never took care of this is one of those unsolved mysteries.

One of these days, maybe in the summer, we’ll spend some time working on genealogy. Ancestry.com has provided us with approximately one jillion hints of possible connections. Anyone who’s ever spent any appreciable time finding their roots knows that it is a rabbit hole that would have Alice wondering.

Cinema

I may have seen more recent movies. But she has viewed FAR more movies from the last century, especially the 1930s through the 1960s, almost all of them released before she was born. I keep threatening to veg out on TCM or some other channel, but I haven’t done so yet.

So she knows who Barbara Stanwick is. I mean, I do too, but only because she was on the TV series The Big Valley (1965-1969), while she’ll know the performer from classics such as Double Indemnity (1944), but also from the more obscure fare.

For the most part, she knows her performers from the Studio Age of cinema. Of course, she has a pretty uncanny ability to recall things from our childhood, events I’ve long forgotten.

Happy birthday, baby sister.

9/11: when you don’t believe

memories

9-11-looking-back-looking-aheadTwo articles about 9/11:

An issue of the Now I Know newsletter was particularly fascinating. It was called When You Don’t Believe Your Past Self.

“Think back to a major moment in your life — something which you truly think you remember each and every detail about. Now, try to recall something mundane from that day, something unrelated to the main events of the moment. What you ate for breakfast, which shoes you were wearing, the weather, the day of the week, etc. Unless you have a savant-level recall, chances are your memory of that fact is, at best, a guess…

“But where is that line between ‘important stuff’ and ‘I think it was a Thursday and cloudy out? It turns out that, even on days we think are seared into our memories, those memories aren’t very reliable.

“Actually, it’s worse than that. If one leading study is any indicator, not only do our memories kind of suck, but we can’t really deal with that fact.

“For horrible reasons, most of who were alive on September 11, 2001, can remember a lot about where we were and what we were doing that morning… Plug in just most other dates in the last fifty years, though and that’s not the case. For memory researchers, 9/11 [was an] opportunity to run experiments that are hard to replicate.

“A year after the terrorist attacks, a group of researchers from asked more than 3,000 respondents… to write down their memories of 9/11 — where they were when they found out about the attacks, who they were with, etc. The research made the same requests of the same people a year later and then again in 2011, ten years after the attacks. And what they found… was that stories changed over time…”

eight forty-six

From 8:46 AM 9/11 to 8 minutes 46 seconds, 2020

“The attack on the World Trade Center led to responses that are not possible today. In France the headline of the newspaper Le Monde was ‘Nous sommes tous américains — We Are All Americans…’

“Nineteen years later the French may still remember but it is a different United States they see today. The eyes of the world are still upon us but what do they see now.

“1. They see a country which failed to manage the coronavirus, became the world leader in coronavirus deaths, declared victory, and moved on content to have 800-1,000 deaths a day forever.

“2. They see a country divided by racism preparing to refight the Second American Civil War.

“3. They see a country that has abandoned its world leadership position of its own free will.”

Memory, or my lack thereof

Music is a tremendous help in recalling things.

Chris said: Your memory is striking. Next “Ask Anything” I’m asking about that: do you remember the first time usually, or do you have to return to it repeatedly like most people, just you’re more diligent about than most?

Well, let me say that there are plenty of things I don’t remember. Some of it has to do with functionality. For instance, I know that Sonny Perdue is Secretary of Agriculture. When Obama was President, I knew Tom Vilsack was. But since he’s not anymore, he has slipped my mind. The only former Secretary I can remember is the infamous Earl Butz, under Nixon.

This isn’t a recent thing. When I worked at FantaCo in the 1980s, I usually made the bank deposits every weekday, and I’d see and briefly chat with one of the two tellers. One of them left, and seven months later, I saw her on the street. I could ask her about her cats or the problems she had with her apartment. Yet for the life of me, I could not remember her name.

I hate going to parties and meeting a bunch of new people. Despite all of those tricks I’ve read about overcoming this issue, it continues to dog me.

In junior high, I was supposed to memorize the Gettysburg Address; the whole thing is two minutes long. But I was unable to accomplish this. Likewise, I had a monologue in a high school production of The Bald Soprano by Eugene Ionesco, and the Fire Chief had some incoherent rambling I just couldn’t master.

If people tell me things, I’m not as good as if I read them. I specifically have no capacity for line dancing because the mind can’t remember what the caller just said thrice before letting us go on our own.

On the other hand, things involving numbers I’m much better at. My daughter’s Social Security number, my library card number. If I get hit by a car, I won’t remember anything about the car except its license plate.

Music, too, is a tremendous help in recalling things. The Daughter is doing well in social studies because she knows most of the lyrics to the musical Hamilton. This is how she knows the first four Presidents.

But some things I just know. All of the Presidents, their political parties and the years they took office. I don’t know ALL the Secretaries of State, but a good chunk of them.

When I was on JEOPARDY! in 1998, and I had to put in order the statehood of three states, I could visualize a map in my fifth-grade class, with California already a state in 1850, when the other territories north and west of Texas were not. So Nebraska was next. Oklahoma, which I know from Rogers and Hammerstein, didn’t become a state until 1907, so it was the 46th, I know without looking it up.

Of course, like most people, I also remember things tied to a significant event. How beautiful the weather was in New York State on 11 September 2001. The look on Lee Harvey Oswald’s face when he as shot by Jack Ruby in November 1963, which I watched on live TV.

And I can have memories of events that astonishes people, but only because some other fact triggered it. I believe I try to pay attention.

Finally, writing it down is useful. The blog is often doing just that, so, if for no other reason, I should keep it up for a while.

What is the information?

When I could not blog the last week in December, my brain got overloaded with stuff I wanted to offload.

InformationMark Evanier noted an article about information:

Anne Pluta says that the trouble with Donald Trump voters is not that they are uninformed but that they are misinformed. Biggggg difference. Uninformed people just plain don’t know. Misinformed voters think they do but they’re wrong — and they’re usually determined to never admit it.

Then Alan David Doane pointed to Frank Santoro, who wrote:

I asked my editor and comics scholar, Dan Nadel, about this occasionally quoted sentiment of younger makers
towards older makers and he said, “Here’s the thing about ‘knowing your history’ (you can quote me): It’s soooo easy. It’s a short history, there’s less than like 50 essential works that would take you about a week to digest, and, y’know, if you’re ambitious as an artist in the sense that you care about making good art (as opposed to making books, making Twitter, making a persona etc. etc.), it’s useful to know what was done before you in the medium of your choice. Only in comics (seriously) can one find a streak of self-hatred so strong that people would proudly talk about not knowing the history of the medium.

I realized why ADD’s rant about Facebook, on Facebook, made sense to me. A lot of those misinformed, or deliberately uninformed, people seem to gravitate there. “I am trying to wrestle it to the ground and preserve its usefulness while eliminating as many annoyances and aggravations as possible.” At the same time, I get less the value of, as one of his friends noted, “like a good cocktail party. You want interesting, stimulating conversation and a wide range of opinions.”

Chuck points to something Pat Robertson said about David Bowie. Except he didn’t say it. (And if he had, who cares? But that’s another issue, about online OUTRAGE.)
asimov

Some people are just mean, usually trolls, which is why SamuraiFrog doesn’t allow anonymous comments on any of his social media. “Mean” is a kinder word than what I’m really thinking.

I posit that if there’s a story about a firefighter saving a cat from a tree, it’ll be attacked by trolls. Some will think government money shouldn’t be spent on such minor activity, someone else will suggest the tree was harmed, some dog owner will suggest preferential treatment for felines, a person will note that it was a white cat and ask whether a black cat would have gotten equal treatment, and yet another person will declare that there must have been a payoff by the evil cat lobby.

Plus Facebook is just a time suck. I don’t even comment as much because, even when pleasant, is a degree of back-and-forth I don’t seem to have available. Some people seemed to get ticked off with me when I haven’t caught all their latest news, much of which is some boring memes.

Beyond FB, there’s a LOT of social media I have joined, such as GoodReads and Pinterest, which I find benign at worst, but simply cannot fit into the calendar. Those things that reward you for writing on your blog every day: I do the writing, but can’t be bothered to let “them” know.

But the blog stays. When I could not blog the last week in December, my brain got overloaded with stuff I wanted to offload. And it is, as as Arthur notes, an aid to memory. My memory. It is an information resource for ME. And, optimally, you too.
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The Novel is Dead, Celebrity is a Disease, and More

Helmet head

I’ve discovered that, people with bike helmets are more visible.

Bicycle_HelmetThis is less a question than a statement by a guy who’s a Facebook friend, who I see seldom in real life, though he lives in the area:

I see you walking around with your bike helmet, even when you’re not riding.

To be clear, I DO have my bike with me. I responded, “You never know when some space debris might fall.”

The TRUTH of the matter, though, is that, sometimes, I forget, occasionally, that the helmet’s on. More likely, though, is that I’m afraid I WILL forget the helmet.

This has happened THIS calendar year: I wait for a bus with my bike (because I’m going on that 1.5 mile stretch over I-90 since bikes aren’t allowed.) I get on the bus. Getting ready to get off the bus, I realize I don’t have the helmet. In this case, I called The Wife, as she was home from school, and she managed to retrieve it.

This ALSO happened several months ago: I get off the bus take my bike off the front of the bus, the bus drives off, and only then do I realize the helmet is not on my head. It was winter or early spring, so I had a knit hat on, which I wear UNDER my helmet. Feeling SOMETHING on my head fools me into believing that I had my helmet. Fortunately, this bus, at my work site, doubled back, and I got the helmet before it left the area.

A secondary reason for wearing the helmet is to protect me from the sun. The vitiligo is particularly bad on the top of my head, and the helmet offers a measure of protection when I’m sitting at a translucent bus stop.

There are a lot of adults who don’t wear bicycle helmets when driving in the city, since it is not mandated. I think they are CRAZY. I’ve discovered that, in general, people with bike helmets are more visible. Helmet use has been estimated to reduce head injury risk by 85 percent.

I’d rather look silly wearing a bike helmet than end up brain dead.

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