Syzygeist

Row Row Row Your Boat, Gently...

With uncertainty and complexity abounding, too much information flooding over most of us and the Global Happiness Index (GHI) challenged by much in modern life, it's worth noting that the best advice is often wrapped in a children's story or rhyme, which only endures to be repeated through generations and across cultures because it is quintessentially true. 

Few can beat the little song we used to sing in rounds while on summer holiday before anyone held a hand-held anything to amuse them during those seemingly endless hours in the car. (And kids singing verses together don't squabble.) 

This one has its origins in English nursery rhyme and American minstrel songs and supposedly first appeared in print in the U.S. in 1852.

Row row row 

your boat

gently

down the stream

merrily merrily merrily merrily

life is

but a dream. 

Why should this have become such a repeated mantra for children? Full of advice for getting through life, it has inspired many to reflect on its deeper meanings. As a sailor who has often rowed back and forth between shore and a sailboat, I have had plenty of time to think about it - and enthusiastically sung it many times with my own children when they were small.

Row row row 

Rowing requires both hands, applied equally for the most part (and use your back and legs if you want to bring real strength to the action) and a sense of direction. 

Balance! Don't pull too hard to one side unless you want to turn or you will soon be off course. Steady and rhythmical is almost always better than too much effort expended in bursts. Repetition and self control matter. Practice makes perfect.

Your boat 

Not someone else's. You're in it so you need to take care of it. It's the only one you've got. And it is uniquely yours - in what it's made of and contains and where it's going (or could go).You are on your own in most respects. So care for your boat like no other.

Gently 

Of all the adverbs in the language to appear here, why this one? Think about the way you conduct yourself. How does it feel, and feel to others? Considerate, tender, gradual, refined, of good family - and the word hints etymologically "of the same clan." So row with a sense of belonging among others - congenially.

Down the stream 

Yes, go with the flow, not fighting the current (although this may be necessary sometimes) but using the nature and direction of the stream to help you along. A stream is always moving and never exactly the same in any other place or at any other time.  So keep paying attention to the stream wherever you find yourself in it.

Merrily merrily merrily merrily 

"In a joyous manner" is one definition offered, but also consider that this adverb (any word that describes action) is repeated four times. No other word is given as much space or attention. So attitude matters a lot! And this attitude should live in the world of delight, pleasure, humor and joy.

Life  

Ah, life itself - everything around you that you see, feel, touch, smell, know, imagine, desire, fear, revile or revere...  

is but a dream. 

Images, ideas and emotions that seem to come upon us or that we may conceive spontaneously are all in us. This complex of perceptions are "real" but also "imagined" in the sense that they are the unique images we take from - or bring to - the world. That world is in us too. (Some might say it had its origins in us from birth, or even before that!) 

Is life not as we imagine it to be?

Row row row your boat, gently, down the stream… 

Merrily merrily merrily merrily - life is but a dream... 

Amen.

Don't Think POM, If You Can't

Go watch "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold," by Morgan Spurlock, the man who brought you "Supersize Me" 
and who has evidently figured out how to supersize himself. This smart, tongue-in-cheek, manipulative movie about manipulation via product placement and brand campaigning will send you out of the theater wondering. At least it did me.
Spurlock's is not the self-aggrandizing approach one gleans from fellow documentarian Michael Moore, whose movies seem really to be about Michael-the-Main-Character in the end.
True, Spurlock has built his own brand as a spoofer-satirist-commercial-social critic by leaps and bounds, but he has done it in a way that hearkens back to newspaper columnist James Kilpatrick, who said every piece of persuasion should follow the same form: "Let me take you by the hand and show you a place I know, which for seeing will change you forever." This will.
Spurlock sets out to reveal the world of product placement and brand-building that takes place as a subtext of movie-making, where things appear on the screen not for dramatic intention or even because they belong there, but because a sponsor bought the right to put them there - or even, perhaps, forced them onto a director. This applies to drinks, cereals, cars, clothes, shoes... Major movies, we are told, cannot be made without this revenue stream, about which you as a consumer are told next to nothing.
About the only product not mentioned or shown here were weapons, and I found myself wondering what Winchester and Glock et. al. have to do with shoot--em-up action or war movies where machine guns are required. Spurlock did not go there.
But if you ever wonder why you think about some of the things - I mean, things - that you think about, this movie will give you some new or reinforced ideas. It worked on me like a charm as Spurlock worked his way to a prime sponsor - POM (as in, pomegranate juice) - who ponied up a cool $1 million to be the banner sponsor - for which there is in exchange enough POM consumed onscreen in odd moments to cure your urinary tract of any weaknesses, as we learn it allegedly has the power to do.
If you listen carefully to Spurlock at a key pitch moment before the POM CEO and her underlings, you would believe that this miracle juice can heat up male ardor, if you know what I mean. In an hilarious boardroom scene, Spurlock shows his rendering of an ad for the juice that is too graphic for the company's female founder, but it does evince a knowing smile.
Spurlock ends up using text the company wants him to use, and wonders if he has sold out, or is doomed to be a sellout as he gathers commercial support with Sheetz and Austin Mini to name two. No, one ad executive assures him, he is not "selling out," he is "buying in."
Along the way you learn that Sao Paolo, Brazil has wiped out all outdoor advertising to great aesthetic effect. In the US, sponsors and advertisers now spend slightly north of $450 billion a year to shower and surround us with images of all kinds, of which 75 percent is controlled through four major agencies. If you ever wondered if there is really a "them" organizing our cultural perceptions, you will come away with a sense that yes, they are, and now you know mostly who they are.
The movie also brings along a few academic experts to assert the fallacy of persuading people that their lives can be made richer and better by products, and also by an advocate who wants all subliminal advertising of this kind made transparent via screen popups. You have to see this happening, which you will, to get a feeling for what it would mean and to decide if you think this would be a good thing. I think it might.
I came out of the theater and headed for the men's room, as people of my age tend to do after a couple of hours, and followed a tall, slow-moving gentleman accompanied by two body guards. Soon we were all four lined up at the men's urinals. I found myself wondering about the various potential effects of pomegranate juice, real and perceived, on four guys like us, and wondering if they were also wondering, since we were all clearly over 50 (and the tallest among us was considerably older.)
As we left and exited the building, the two bodyguards ushered the tall gentleman into a waiting black car. I recognized former New York Mayor Ed Koch. Did he feel as a matter of public policy that something needs to be done about this world of image-making and cultural influence Spurlock showed is being somewhat deviously thrust upon us, mostly without our knowing?
I did not get a chance to ask before the black car sped away. But because POM was so on my mind - I thought I might pick up a few bottles to see what I think and see what it does (31 grams of sugar per bottle, about 7-8 teaspoons worth!) - it occurred to me that Spurlock had made his point. For that $1 million, POM had been penetratingly insinuated into my thoughts - and I am sure the former Mayor of New York got it too.

What Barry Bonds Shrank From (The Truth?)

A trip this past weekend for a book-signing party in San Francisco, city of my post-youth growing up,
brought a flood of associations and memories and in this case a brush with the famous and the infamous.

The party included a predictably amusing encounter with one Lance Williams, the gifted investigative journalist (and co-author with Mark Fainaru-Wada of Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO and the Steroid Scandal that Rocked Professional Sports) with whom I worked as an editor when the San Francisco Examiner was still a viable afternoon paper owned by the Hearst Corporation.

Lance broke the early stories about Bonds and steroid use. Bonds was just convicted last week of obstruction of justice while being acquitted of perjury. So the jury concluded Barry did not lie to the Grand Jury about whether he knew he was taking steroids. 

This I found fascinating and a bit disillusioning. You mean after all this, the court process cannot establish that Bonds was taking steroids and he knew it and he lied about it?

Lance could only look at me and grin as I suggested a line of questioning that I thought Bonds should have faced.

Prosecutor: Mr. Bonds, when did you notice that your testicles were shrinking?

Bonds: (Unintelligible)

Prosecutor: Had you ever experienced shrunken testicles, or had reason to think that shrinking testicles were normal for an athlete of your age and ability?

Bonds: Uh, could you repeat that question?

Prosecutor: Let me put it this way. As you became more readily angered by small things, as your head and other parts of you grew larger while other, arguably important parts of you grew smaller, did you wonder why? Did you wonder about those injections that Gary Anderson gave you?

Bonds: Uh, I never really thought about it.

Prosecutor: Let the record show that Mr. Bonds is now apparently telling the truth.

Bonds: (Grunt.)

Prosecutor: Am I right in thinking you did not want to take the stand in your own defense because you felt you might incriminate yourself?

Bonds: Yes, I think so.

Prosecutor: So be it. 

Of course, that is how it was. Bonds declined to take the stand in his own defense. We are left with a great(?) athlete thoroughly besmirched. His records and reputation are in tatters, and a jury was unable to conclude without a shadow of doubt that he knew he was being injected with steroids - despite the visible changes in his body and personality, to which Kimberly Bell, a former intimate testified. (For derision Youtube-style, see also this.) 

The jury had to decide whether Bell was telling the truth or doctoring the facts to hurt a former lover from whom she'd unhappily split. Jurors also had to conclude whether Greg Anderson, who has gone to jail rather than testify, really injected Bonds with steroids as Anderson apparently was overheard to say on a locker-room tape made in 2003.

One might ask: who cares, in the end? Barry Bonds has been punished, betrayed by his deal with the Devil. Whoever once thought him a miracle hitter now knows otherwise, and he can take his place with Jose Canseco and Jason Giambi and others who juiced to improve their performance, got caught at it and either confessed or lied or kept quiet.

As someone with a 12-year-old son who plays a good game of baseball and dreams about being in the Big Leagues some day, I would have liked all the Bondsian facts to come out in open testimony, so that young players know what is really at stake here. A larger head (Bonds needed an increased hat size from 2002 to 2003, the clubhouse manager testified) is one thing, but smaller testicles and waning sexual ability are something else (this is perhaps a male view) and as warnings go, I prefer this one to be clear and well known.  

I am not suggesting that injecting Human Growth Hormone (HGH) would somehow be okay if procreative equipment were not compromised. It's a question of which bodily effect is more likely to scare young players away from their own potential performance-drug experiments in a highly pressurized and competitive society.

So Lance and I had a bit of a laugh - ironic and bittersweet though it felt - about questions that were never asked and never answered because, some might feel, they did not need to be. That is, unless you believe Bonds committed perjury before the Grand Jury, as accused, and should have been convicted of it, given the evidence against him.

Was justice achieved here? Maybe so. Whatever is left of Bonds - the man and the reputation, greater or smaller -  is the man he will live with, with full knowledge all his own. 

Does he still have a shot at Baseball's Hall of Fame? Does anyone care?

Less Fat With Our Movies, Please

If you are a casual or regular movie goer, at least in New York City, you have perhaps experienced the routine "super-sizing" of snacks that goes on there. At a recent movie I requested a "small" soda and was told I could get a discount on an additional food product if I purchased a medium or large. (Why was that, I wondered? Oh, soda is cheap at wholesale, very profitable to sell, and other snacks are even more profitable.)
I found myself at a jammed food island at a Brooklyn cinema (a major chain that can go nameless) with people around me who might have been cast as The Hulk and who were avidly gathering tubs of popcorn and kegs of soda to accompany their movie viewing. I could not help but notice these were people who contribute to the obesity statistics in the US that make us perhaps the fattest country in the world, with all the health issues that attend on overweight.

No, I said, I wanted a small - and was then confronted with a tub of soda that would have filled a Toyota fuel tank. This is "small?" But I didn't actually want a side order of diabetes with my movie, since I happen to know a single can of soda contains at least 10 teaspoons of sugar. (An "average" US consumer was eating about 100 plus pounds of sugar a year a decade ago, up 28% since 1983 - probably without knowing it. And sugar crowds out more nutritious alternatives from anyone's daily diet, according to The Center for Science in the Public Interest. Have you ever seen broccoli offered in a movie theater?)
I bring this topic to the attention of anyone willing to fling himself into the public policy debate here.
The US Food and Drug Administration has just announced a set of rules to require caloric disclosure in restaurant chains and other major eateries. The restaurant industry wanted this federal law to avoid a patchwork of conflicting local rules. The proposed law would exempt movie theaters because, as the movie industry explained in its lobbying effort, movies are "escapist entertainment" where people do not go principally to eat.
Oh, really? 
It happens that New York City is a locale where movie theaters are required to disclose caloric content, although this seems not to deter the people I saw from stuffing their maws with sugar and butter-laden treats of all sizes. Whether this yummy food contributed to their escapist experience I cannot say, but I am inclined to think that it did. Maybe watching the movie helped the fact of getting unhealthier escape their notice.
But I lose my point here. If caloric disclosure is considered a good idea for public health and is being applied to help guide people to healthier behavior in restaurants, why should the government exclude movie theaters chains, where eating junk is apparently half the fun? It's safe to say that if an industry can sell a 10-cent bucket of sugar water for $4, it may not want the public interest to interfere. 

It's more sensible to ask whether disclosure really deters those who want to escape in all ways, and the answer might be mostly no. (The Ace study (www.acestudy.org) suggests that overweight people have in startlingly large proportion been molested or otherwise damaged as children, but that is another story. Other research suggests that the most effective remedy for major obesity is starvation, no "normal" food whatsoever, but with vitamin supplements along the way. That's another story too.)
Warnings on cigarettes have contributed to anti-smoking awareness, so soda-guzzlers and buttered popcorn packers might well benefit from the news that applies. We might also start by educating more children on the simple premise that you are what you eat, and that applies in movie theaters as well.