NezSez

The World is Full of Mysteries

Ever notice how much mystery plays a part in our lives?

“Peek-a-boo! I see you!”

That innocent game we play with a baby is probably the child’s first conscious introduction to mysteries. When the blanket is up, where did mommy go? When it’s down, oh, there she is!

From that moment on, we are constantly engaged in solving mysteries.

Going to school allows us to find the answers to the mystery of:

• spelling
• arithmetic
• whether or not Susie likes Calvin

Mysteries are what fuels scientist’s curiosity:

• Are birds descendants of dinosaurs?
• Who built the giant statues of Easter Island?
• What can we do to save this species from extinction?

Many of us face personal issues to which we seek answers, such as those offered by unscrupulous marketers:

• “Learn the 10 Secrets the Pros Don’t Want You to Know!”
• “Lose 30lbs in 30 Days!”
• “Get Rich Using these 5 Easy Steps!”

We seek out and are entertained by mysteries in stories such as:

• Sherlock Holmes
• Indiana Jones
• Harry Potter

Why are Mysteries Important?

If you don’t think mysteries are important, let me ask you the following:

• Have you ever seen a movie where you start realizing what’s going to happen before it happens? Ruins the fun, right? That’s like telling people Darth Vader is Luke’s father before they saw Empire Strikes Back in 1980.
• Or how about seeing a magician do a trick that you’ve already seen before? The effect is not as…magical.
• Or why a woman wearing revealing clothing that much sexier than if she was simply nude?
• When you go see an Opera, Ballet, Musical, or Play at the theater, what if they didn’t have a drawn curtain?

We Love the Tease

Ever hear advice about writing a cover letter for your resume? Or how about a book proposal, or any proposal. What about the opening minutes of a TV show? The inside cover of a book jacket? Magazine cover? Promotional mailer?

They all feature something short, quick and easy to remember — to tease you into looking for more.

The best ones present a compelling mystery, one which you are eager to solve.

The Quest for Knowledge

• If fiction, we have the “MacGuffin”, what director Alfred Hitchcock referred to as an object or person — SOMETHING! — that is being chased after, sought after, and fought over. That continued searching is what the viewer of his films get hooked on.
• In Dashiell Hammet’s Maltese Falcon - detective Sam Spade is after the “black bird”, a supposedly jewel-encrusted statuette worth millions. His partner is murdered, and various parties are all after the falcon. What’s going to happen?
• J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings - how is Frodo and his band going to destroy the One Ring, in the face of overwhelming odds?

In real life, we have the quest for knowledge.

• Buddha, in the process of becoming the Buddha, sought to answer to why humans suffered
• Leonardo Da Vinci, the Wright Brothers, and other dreamers sought out the answers to flight.
• We each all have our goals, and often wonder how we are to achieve them.

Mysteries engage our minds, our imagination, and our creativity.

The Mystery of Blogging

It even applies to our blogging.

Why do we ultimately subscribe to someone’s RSS feed?

To find out what’s going to be written next.

Have a great weekend!

I leave you with the following inspirational video clip:

TEDTalks: J.J. Abrams: The Mystery Box

Thank you so much for checking out my blog! If you like what you see, I'd like to invite you to subscribe to my RSS feed and maybe tell your friends about it. I'd really appreciate it!

Far-Sightedness versus Short-Sightedness

I learned the difference between far-sightedness and short-sightedness in high school, and I’m not talking about needing to wear glasses. I’m talking about seeing long-term and short-term effects of a specific action.

It Happened in History class

The inciter was one of my history teachers, whom I shall call Mr. F.

He was certainly not a great teacher by any means — in fact, he normally taught P.E. — but for whatever reasons, we had him for one semester of U.S. History.

What normally happened was we would be cruising along through the textbook during lecture when one thing or another from the text would prompt him to go off on tangents. Here are two that I recall:

• Railroads - Mr. F would wax nostalgic about the railroad system of the late 1800’s, during the Industrial Revolution. Tracks spanned all across the country, and you can go most anywhere via a romantic train ride. Cities and industries grew due to the “iron horse”. Then, along came the trucking companies, who, in the interest of increasing truck sales, started buying up the railroads, and then simply shut them down, all in the name of profits. For Mr. F this was one of the great injustices wreaked by corporations, one apparently he had never forgiven.
• S.F. Municipal Transportation - On another occasion, Mr. F would talk about something closer to home — San Francisco used to have a lot more streetcar lines (verified by looking at any old historic S.F. photo book). However, the same automobile companies came along and convinced (read: bought off) local politicians to have many streetcar lines removed, so that buses could be sold to the city.

Mr. F would go on exclaiming, “Do you know how many trucks are needed to haul all the freight that can be loaded onto a string of freight cars pulled by a single locomotive, and how much fuel is wasted!?” And he would the class in a huff!

Similar diatribes would occur throughout the semester, and we, being young teenagers, would always snicker afterwards and shake our heads, thinking how bitter Mr. F was.

Looking Back at that Class

Now, looking back, that’s where I got my first taste of the kind of harm corporations can do when they emphasize short-term gains over the greater benefit that often comes from actions geared toward a long-term vision. The idea to always think about long-term effects has stuck with me ever since.

All because of one bitter old man.

I found the recent Yahoo! Finance article 7 Extreme Ways to Save Money pretty interesting. It basically discussed various (extreme) ways to cut costs. For me, the last one mentioned is the simplest:

Ditch the TV

The Yahoo! article says by trashing the TV, people would be saving money because they’d no longer be bombarded by ads, which makes sense, right? However, I think the idea of either no longer watching (or watching much less) television is worthy of an entire post.

Disclaimer - I DO Watch TV

First of all, I will admit that growing up, I was a TV junkie. My summers were often spent watching reruns of everything from Leave It to Beaver to Gilligan’s Island to Star Trek and Monkees. So, yes, I’ve watched my share of TV, and a lot of who I am did come from the influence of TV shows (see my post on Star Trek).

Today, my weak spot is Heroes.

But really, with our society so bathed in media 24/7, sometimes it’s a good idea to simply…disconnect.

Benefits of Foregoing TV

Being self employed and with a family as well, I find I have very little time for TV anyway. If it’s on these days, it’s really only for the kids.

For me, here’s what not watching the ol’ tube has allowed:

1. I’ve Regained the Opportunity Costs - for me, this is the most important. This means that instead of spending time watching TV, that time is now used for something else that’s more productive, such as spending time with the family, doing chores (brownie points from the spouse), working (good for clients), or sleeping (good for me )
2. I’m more Proactive - TV is a passive medium. You sit there and simply get spoken to. When it’s on, I get into the mindless and time-wasting habit of channel surfing, trying to find something worth watching. Now, I either read, do some exercise, or go out for a walk.
3. I Free my Mind - When I’m not watching TV, I no longer have to get enthralled in some reality show, listen to a get-rich-quick-scheme, hear about the latest diet fad, or be cajoled into calling right now while operators are standing by to get the extra free knife set (still have the pay shipping)! When I think about it, those shows serve no real good purpose except to eat up my time. I’m not going to be on Jeopardy! or do anything where useless TV knowledge will come in handy, and I certainly don’t need to buy more stuff. Because it’s easy to access, cheap (or free), and there’s a lot of it, TV is like junk food for the mind. Free yourself from its grasp, and now you’re able to think.
4. I Have a Quieter Household - In the old days, I used to turn on the TV, and it would be on for hours, even if I was doing something else. But now, with it usually off, it’s much more peaceful — and I can even listen to music.
5. I Can Appreciate the Good Shows more - Now, on the rare occasion I do watch a show, it’s more of a well-deserved break from my busy day. I’m sure the experience will never be like in the Golden Age of Television where families tuned into live shows, but at least I am more in control of my own life. And I pick and choose more carefully the one or two shows to watch for simple entertainment.

Try Less TV

Television is a powerful medium, with great influence on people who watch. I am not saying we should completely ban TV, either. I have simply just found that now that I really don’t watch TV that much, I have more time to simply be myself, and to think for myself and do the things I want to do in this life.

If you watch more than an hour a day, try taking a break for a week with the mindset you’ll do some of the things you’ve always wanted to work on (read that book, work on that painting, go workout, etc.)

You might like it.

I recall there was talk about the paperless society when the internet started becoming popular, and predictions were made about the demise of the brick-and-mortar bookstore.

New Reader Technologies

Indeed, with recent technologies such as the Apple iPhone and Amazon Kindle, we may soon be at the point where we will have something like the PADD from Star Trek The Next Generation — multitouch screen technology, innovative, energy efficient, highly-readable displays, ubiquitous information access, etc. We would get tremendous amount of data storage, search features and convenience — who wouldn’t want one, right?

I think people would want one, as much as many want the iPhone. And there is no doubt that the ultimate electronic reader will soon come into existence. Perhaps there will be a rental fee for it, with the ability to borrow an online book for as long as we want to read it, a la the Netflix model. It’s coming, I can feel it.

But Books Will Never Die

At least for the foreseeable future. I’m sure there will be a Tipping Point when books start to decline, but just as film and photography has not seen the disappearance of painting and drawing, these new technologies will most likely play alongside Gutenberg’s legacy format for some time.

Reasons Books Still Remain Popular

The way I see it, there are (at least) 5 reasons why people still love books:

1. Books Appeal to the Human Senses - There’s nothing quite like lifting and feeling the heft of a well-made book: the leather binding of an old classic, with its roughly-cut edges, and its lightly-textured pages, or the smooth pages of a coffee table picture book, with its colorful images, or even simply the worn-out, dog-eared pages of a favorite paperback novel. A book appeals to our sense of sight, touch, and even smell.
2. Books Offer Convenience - While the new technology offers unparalleled ease-of-use, the book already meets a certain minimum standards of convenience that makes the media popular. A book is always “on”, ready to be read at a moment’s notice — no recharging or wireless network is ever needed to read a book.
3. Books are Visual Reminders - To completely read a typical book usually requires more than one sitting, and the book physical form allows it to simply be placed anywhere, sure, but usually in a spot where it serves as a visual reminder to “read me”: desk, beside table, even the toilet tank top :).
4. Books Create Social Impressions - What happens when I visit a friend or even go to a party is that I am often drawn to their bookshelves (if they have one) for a couple of reasons. One is to see if they had a book I would think is interesting — and this can become a point of conversation — and the other reason is I get a better picture of what kind of person they are: how well-read (if they have more classics), or how well-rounded (if they have a variety), or how well-versed (if they have a large number of say…cookbooks). I wouldn’t be able to be so “nosy” if all they had was a handheld reader (that’s probably password protected, or contain a metrics access function like thumbprint verification).
5. Books have the Ah! Factor - Dog-eared pages, notes scribbled on the side, flipping through pages randomly or going straight to the index if it has one, a book sets up the stage for satisfaction of my need to continue learning, whether it’s through a nonfiction reference book or a trilogy of fiction novels. There’s a great feeling to finally reach the end of a book, when all of the weighty tome has shifted its mass from right to left. And, if it’s a great book or a great story, the feeling is even more powerful.

Books are a concrete way of sending information into the future, and for those of us on the receiving end, I would say reading a book is one of life’s simple pleasures.

If you like this post, you might like my post on

• My Favorite Childhood Books