I picked-up a copy of Internal Bleeding, a book about medical errors, in my quest to better understand the work I have in the healthcare business relating to quality and safety. It primarily lists a lot of cases where errors are a result of poor hand-offs where often everyone assumes someone else must have checked something critical because it was so critical that they generally never need to check it by the time it reaches them. Mistakes resulting from such things include wrong side surgeries like an amputation of the left leg when the right leg needed to be amputated or doing a heart, a lung transplant on a seventeen year old where the blood type doesn't match, and delivering a toxic dose of chemotherapy because the prescription was misunderstood There are systems in place for fixing such issues but they primarily don't get fixed through data warehousing. We could detect whether they happened and suggest that the system be enhanced before something bigger and worse than small errors occurred.

The book has in it a lot of other interesting information in it. For example - someone did a study where they looked at how people evaluate decisions based on risk. People would rather take on additional risk against a loss than risk on a gain. So if someone is given a choice where they will either get $40,000 in cash or take a coin flip for $100,000 or nothing most people would take the $40,000. If they were presented the opposite situation where they could either owe $40,000 or flip a coin and owe either $100,000 or nothing they would take the coin flip. In both cases they are wrong in their choice because the expected value in the first case from their decision would be to trade-off $40,000 for $50,000 and in the second case they would trade a debt of $40,000 for an expected debt of $50,000. This leads people predictably to gamble on long-shot horses more often at the end of the racing day than at the beginning. (One thought I had was to test this by checking on whether the "favored" horses pay better at the end of the day... and to see if there is a way to leverage this in capital markets).

Plenty of other great information in the book about how medicine is practiced, why the system is broken, and tips to fix it. It is very readable focusing on real examples so I recommend it highly even for people not interested in patient safety and quality healthcare initiatives.

Posted by Dan Housman at 05:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

“You’re afraid of your imagination. And even more afraid of dreams. Afraid of the responsibility that begins in dreams. But you have to sleep, and dreams are a part of sleep. When you’re awake you can suppress imagination. But you can’t suppress dreams.” From H. Murakami - Kafka on the Shore

I liked the idea that having a vision of something, a dream of what could be, carries with it a responsibility to work towards fulfilling the concept. It puts us as sometimes unwilling servants to the creation of our own ideas.

While I was on the plane I had the other idea. There was a passage about how the main character was reading a book that had been annotated by another character. It made me think of something that might be a cool concept. What if different people could collaboratively annotate a book analogous to when one person reads a book already underlined and written in by another. It wouldn’t be a very hard technology but basically everyone could be the equivalent of a Talmudic scholar writing in the margins around a book. Sure we have discussion forums on news articles but I was thinking of taking a political book like the one from Barack Obama and letting people add their thoughts. The reader can then choose to read thoughts or view underlined comments from other readers. Some could be in the same group like a class or a book group and others could be strangers like experts or just fans of the author/genre. The annotations could contain links potentially to other books when a book refers to content in another book. It might be especially interesting for something like Shakespear, the bible, or pop-fiction.

There is the barrier that people don’t yet read books in electronic form… but that could change any time now.

Posted by Dan Housman at 11:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"It's been ten years since I listened to so much music. To my surprise, the Rolling Stones and Beach Boys are still going strong.Time really is one big continuous cloth, no? We habitually cut out pieces of time to fit us, so we fool ourselves into thinking that time is our size, but it really goes on and on."

From Haruki Murikami - A Wild Sheep Chase

I liked this passage. It struck me when in the mix of things and phases of life that we create outfits out of time to dress ourselves in but we are ephemeral and it is not.

Posted by Dan Housman at 10:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last night we cooked dinner with some remnants of the four day weekend. I am looking forward to seeing zucchini, squash, rice pilaf, and hot dog on the cover of Gourmet magazine next month. After the grilling was done we were mostly left with the remnants of the vegetables. The fridge still is full of corn and asparagus. What’s for dinner tomorrow? Maybe corn, asparagus, rice and hot dogs.

On Saturday we visited Gloucester with Matt and Kate. When we arrived they were both hard at work mowing or chopping weeds somewhere on the property. We then sat, grilled, and chatted until Hattie and Jose arrived. Hattie mentioned that she had brought the regular desert and I told her that I was excited to eat her Rice Krispie treats before she informed us that the regular desert was apple crisp. We had brought some beers. I had planned to swim but it isn’t an easy proposition in Gloucester with the rocks and the cold water so I just walked around the rocks with Madeline up high on my shoulders.

I spent Sunday chasing girls and getting chased by girls in the pool. The girls were between two and five years old. It started when I threw some of the beach balls into the detached hot tub area, not hot, and we made a game of throwing the balls back and forth. The hard part was that the wind was strong enough that often a good throw would go far off to the left or the right. I suppose I was chasing more beach balls than girls. The other men were building PVC cannons and guns to launch potatoes into the air. I was more interested in floating a few inches beneath the surface of the pool. We were awaiting a storm advertised on the Internet with hail the size of golf balls that never arrived. At some point the kids and mother’s made home made ice cream in a ball from REI that gets super cold when you roll it and put salt and ice into it. Madeline enjoyed sucking down the bottom of the cone and munching on the sweet sugar honeycomb shell at the base.

We drove down to Marshfield for Sunday and Monday nights. On the way I was diverted to Home Depot to purchase a cover for the riding lawn mower because it was trapped in the mud. Dad was worried it would get rained on and rust when the hail storm that was supposed to come finally came. It didn’t. Monday was a good day to sit by the pool. Sarah’s friends came by including Jeff, Meredith, Matt B., Sarah K, and Sarah K’s sister. In their twenties there had been all sorts of drama among this crew of people with Jeff cheating on my wife, Sarah, with Sarah K. but now people were just floating in the pool having let the drama of their twenties out like a bunch of cooked vegetables. Matt got to drinking more than most and had an odd comment about everyone’s siblings but mine. I was too busy in the pool hiding under the water to notice. Jeff and I managed to move the lawn mower trapped in the mud. The new Mosquito Magnet my dad had bought had collected a few thousand bugs but it didn’t stop a few thousand more from launching out of the mud when the mower moved to attack Jeff and me.

Hattie and Jose came by on Tuesday afternoon. Hattie brought thousands of her famous rice krispie treats to appease me. I had liked the apple crisp. We talked about their upcoming marriage and having kids. It’s hard not to talk about kids when you have one. Not long after they arrived and we had eaten our grilled salmon steaks the torrential rain came down upon us. So we ran about putting away the umbrellas and hid inside to watch the downpour.

We took 3A home and the traffic was surprisingly light for a holiday weekend on the way home to Brookline. When we got home we had to unpack everything and drag those vegetable remnants back inside. The extra tax bill where the government had rejected some portion of our return was waiting for us as was the real estate tax bill that needs to be paid by August.

Gemini was sick from the beginning of the weekend acting lethargic and without her trademark constant bark. Sarah K’s sister was the new person on Monday and is studying to be a veterinarian. She looked at Gemini but I never heard the results. Gemini would barely be able to walk from inside the house to outside to pee so she just lay next to her food and water. She got the extra hamburger and some extra chicken. By Tuesday night, July 4th, my parents had taken her to an animal hospital. Mom said that the vet was clinical at first, letting my parents know that they could keep Gemini for observations, but the cancer was very far advanced. My mother asked if the vet would recommend euthanasia and that was the recommendation. So my parents were quite sad when I dropped off Madeline on Wednesday morning because they had just put a loved one to sleep. I gave my mom a hug but I wasn’t sure how to comfort them.

This weekend my family, parents and sister, are driving together up to Toronto to view the unveiling of my grandparents’ tomb stones. Sarah will stay home in Boston with Madeline. With death floating around I get to thinking that death is a great reminder to live fully and not waste healthy days. If there is something I want to do or see I should do it or see it without worrying about the wrong stuff, the reasons why not to do or see things.

I got another little dose of death by watching the Bukowski documentary Born Into This. Sarah wasn’t very interested in the file so she went to read the sequel to The Devil Wears Prada in the bedroom. The end of every documentary is usually the protagonist wasting away from a stroke or cancer. Maybe Hunter S. Thompson shot himself to avoid those slow dying scenes in his documentary. I was struck by a good poem during the movie that made me remember why I have recently come to fear Anne Coulter and her many raving fans.

The genius of the crowd

there is enough treachery, hatred violence absurdity in the average
human being to supply any given army on any given day

and the best at murder are those who preach against it
and the best at hate are those who preach love
and the best at war finally are those who preach peace

those who preach god, need god
those who preach peace do not have peace
those who preach peace do not have love

beware the preachers
beware the knowers
beware those who are always reading books
beware those who either detest poverty
or are proud of it
beware those quick to praise
for they need praise in return
beware those who are quick to censor
they are afraid of what they do not know
beware those who seek constant crowds for
they are nothing alone
beware the average man the average woman
beware their love, their love is average
seeks average

but there is genius in their hatred
there is enough genius in their hatred to kill you
to kill anybody
not wanting solitude
not understanding solitude
they will attempt to destroy anything
that differs from their own
not being able to create art
they will not understand art
they will consider their failure as creators
only as a failure of the world
not being able to love fully
they will believe your love incomplete
and then they will hate you
and their hatred will be perfect

like a shining diamond
like a knife
like a mountain
like a tiger
like hemlock

their finest art

by Charles Bukowski

Posted by Dan Housman at 05:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In my reading of Fear and Loathing in America my interest in Hunter’s letters increased significantly as he approached the dates that covered writing and publishing Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. F&L in America gives plenty of references to Hunter doing plenty of interesting drugs including his firm stance that a part of his candidacy for Sheriff of Aspen was that he would continue to do mescaline on a regular basis. But the volume of mind-altering substances referred to in F&L in Las Vegas was incredible. On the back of the Las Vegas book it summarizes the basic premise that a gonzo journalist and his lawyer had a crazy adventure in Vegas that the average traveler out on a bender could only look at with awe as a religious achievement to bent living:

“We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…. Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls. There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of an ether binge…”

When I first met Sarah two weeks after we had met I had a business meeting in California that took me through Las Vegas on a flight where I met her for some fun in Vegas. We sat by the pool at the Excalibur, sipping drinks and listening to the dim sound of the repetitive Disney style musac in the background, and I read F&L in Las Vegas to Sarah using my best impression of Johnny Depp in the movie who was probably doing his best impression of Hunter himself.

At night we went out to Nephrotite’s lounge in the Luxor tower and drank until about 2 am although we were having trouble getting drunk because of the extra oxygen pumped into the air to keep people from falling asleep while gambling. We left Vegas on a Sunday night skipping our original flight because we were busy playing black jack and drinking free booze on the floor of the MGM Grand which we learned was originally designed to resemble the emerald palace from the Wizard of Oz complete with the yellow markings on the rugs guiding drunken gamblers to the tables to represent the yellow brick road.

I don’t owe the Fear and Loathing book anything with regards to having a continued long term relationship with Sarah. But it is something like a favorite song that I can get a little sentimental about to remember the care free and more wild state of mind I was in when we first met. It's only buddy in the first books that Sarah and I read is Tom Robbin's 'Still Life With Woodpecker, "yumm", that I loaned Sarah because she is a red head.

While Hunter’s Vegas story as a whole smells of hyperbole, and Hunter helps because his style is always hyperbolic – like when he thought the only way to get rid of a girl was to feed her to the lizards in the desert - the amazing thing to learn in F&L in America is that by his own admission: Thompson wasn’t on drugs while working on F&L in Las Vegas.

He wrote in a letter to his publisher – “The only thing that vaguely alarmed me about your letter was your statement to wit: ‘You know it was absolutely clear to me reading Las Vegas that you were not on drugs…’ This is true, but what alarms me is that Vegas I was very conscious attempt to simulate a drug freak out – which is always difficult, but in reading over I still find it depressingly close to the truth I was trying to create.”

So while this isn’t as big of a discovery as the guy who dragged Oprah through the muck with a thousand little pieces I did find it interesting that Hunter, one of the more interesting authors, generally wrote sober even if he did get twisted from time to time.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday was Valentine's day. As a part of a longstanding policy of desynchronizing from the world of people trying to mark-up products Sarah and I have decided to celebrate Valentine's Day the other 364 days of the year by being generally decent to one another and kissing whenever people aren't looking.

As a matter of course I recently learned from Tom Robbins the strange origin of kissing. Apparently kissing wasn't invented until recently in history. Robbins wrote in Wild Ducks Flying Backwards, "kissing, as we know it, was invented by medieval knights for the utilitarian purpose of determining whether their wives had been tapping the mead barrel while the knights were away on the crusades. If history is accurate for once, the kiss began as an osculatory wire tap or oral snoop, a kind of alcoholic chastity belt, after the fact."

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Note to my mom...

I was reading the latest Tom Robbin’s book (Wild Ducks Flying Backwards). I thought you’d find this interesting.

“Joseph Campbell is the world’s most foremost mythologist. Early in his long life, he combined Sir James George Frazer’s discovery that strikingly similar motifs show up in the folktales of all the world’s cultures, with Carl Jung’s notion that myths are metaphors created to illuminate human experience. Thus, doubly inspired, Campbell became a maverick scholar, his books and lectures often scorned by academicians but adored by poets, painters, and enlightened psychoanalysts. His genius was not so much in his exhaustive scholarship, however, as in his intuitive recollection of the importance and relevance of myth to every human soul.”

According to Robbins in 1988 there was a six-part series entitled Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth released by PBS for television after Campbell died in that year. It sounded quite interesting if it is possible to find it through a movie rental service.

Posted by Dan Housman at 03:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The CEO of Forrester sent an email to lots of people about changing from bowties to diamonds and assumed somehow that people know what you are talking about when you say <> or >< with regards to working with customers.

;)

Excerpt:
"Using Jack Welch’s model of servicing the companies you build products for (the diamond: <>) versus merely making the products (the bow tie: ><) revolutionized the buyer/seller relationship in big industry."

Read Bowties to diamonds if you are interested. I didn't bother to try.

Posted by Dan Housman at 09:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The world is conical
While reading the World is Flat I quickly became annoyed in the first chapter about the fundamental premise that the world is flat. I understood the basic idea that the world had evolved in terms of geographic barriers coming down but for me the picture of a flat world looks just like it should before Columbus. At the time geographically things were lined-up on maps so that distances can't be traversed in circles.

A number of geometric rules have been put forth to figure out what geometry that you are in that you can learn about in Feyman's Six Not So Easy Pieces in a chapter on Curved Spaceused to figure out whether Space-Time is curved or not. They generally focus on how a bug experiences their space not knowing it's contour. For example, if a bug tries to walk in a square by turning at right angles on a globe with equidistant measures they won't return to the point where they started.

Now we not only can traverse distances through low cost light speed communications/software, but to me that isn't a flat surface at all. The surface is just redefined where distance is related to the level of sophistication of the communications network and infrastructure. So flat is actually a bad way to describe how things are now. For instance I am closer to Bangalore than to Otis, MA on a telecommunications sophistication map because Bangalore is super wired while Otis hasn't gotten too far in wiring itself.

So if the world isn't flat - then what shape would it look like if we could visualize it. Some smart people at Princeton managed to visualize what the United States looks like through the lens of Presidential politics in the Princeton 2004 Election maps. So why not build some other maps about the world.

While trying to figure out the shape of the cyber-world is a wierd question it may not be possible to do and to create a new map structure from it. My first guess was that I could see the world first in a flat structure but upon adding that Bangalor is close to Boston the map would need to somehow put these points closer to each other. A reasonable way to do this would be to first flatten the map into a circle (since it is the base of a cone) with oceans towards the edges as best as possible. Then above the map build a cone ending at a point above it at the top. Rather than having mountains above the map the height of the area would rise upwards through the cone to the top based on how connected it was to the Internet, etc. If the resolution was infinite then two people talking on a telephone in cyberspace to each other would both be stretched to the top of the cone and facing each other. But since this would be an approximate map, just like the flat maps of the world not showing relief, the average in a region of connectedness to the world through a number would set the height of the peak for a region and the pull into the central point of the cone. The distance between any two places would actually no longer be readable on the lower circular map of the world but from their relative heights or a path that factored both geographic distance and the relative heights.

This new cyberworld map unfortunately would be very hard to read because things get pretty dense towards the top of a cone. If 750 cities all ended-up in a point it would have a lot of labels sticking out of it. This isn't a new problem. You can't read road signs on a map of the whole globe. You need to be able to zoom in and out. So one solution is to be able to change the view from the bottom to the top. At the bottom you have standard road sign problems but since the top condenses a lot your views probably should take cross sections - from height a-b and display what's in them labelled correctly.

In another way to approach this the world could be looked at with two dimensions. Each point would be defined A) by a two dimensional E-W land area (like a district, suburb, etc.) and B) by a number from zero to one representing a measurment number. The reason for measuring from zero to one would be to normalize the measurement such that every area was on the same scale, whatever that scale was. An actual number could be used but then a scale would need to be figured out to translate it into a picture. The measurement itself would be important for determining the outcome of the map but it could measure -- % saturation of cell phones, % users with Interet computers, etc. Next the little squares with E-W land areas could be sorted by range from 0-1 into a line. Now this doesn't look like a map yet but it does provide a start for displaying how close things are. The other dimension could be another arbitrary item including longitude and latitude mixed into a variable that would project a full globe onto a line such that Boston would still be somewhat near Bedford.

I unfortunately don't have the time to make such maps. If you are from Wired Magazine or Time or Princeton and you would like to collaborate with me and give me a team of programmers in Bangalore to create the maps... you'll know where to find me. I am somewhere midway up the cybercone near the US cluster.

Posted by Dan Housman at 03:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have been listening to The World is Flat in my car as I drive from Brookline to Newton to Burlington to Brookline to Cambridge etc. It is ironic to listen to a book about how easy it is to virtualize work so that I can eek out some learning while I am not virtually doing work (sort-of) in cities that are each twenty to thirty miles apart.

I think that the book is interesting although my main beefs about it are that I already know a lot of what is in the first section of the book going over the history of the past ten years because I lived in it and had my eyes open. But I am willing to suffer through a long explanation of what PayPal is in order to get some inside views and interviews with folks that I never had the time or availability of information to get while the Internet bubble/boom was starting.

I also missed out because I was busy on a lot of areas that evolved and I didn't even notice because I wasn't looking. While we used Open Source software at ChannelWave I never understood much about the history and how short the history was and how it was linked to the Internet itself with the first real big hit open source project being the Apache web server. The name Apache was both because the group wanted to appear to be a defiant and independant organization that was strong. Apparently the Apache Native Americans were the last tribe to surrender to the Europeans. But the word also can be heard as A-Patchy Server. The Open Source concept was to apply patches from multiple sources once vetted to keep improving and maintaining the software.

When interviewed, one of the original Apache leaders stressed that software is more like a vegetable than a building - it gets stale if it isn't constantly refreshed. I like to think of it as more like a living organism or group of reproducing living organisms such that both the code (kinda like the original genetic stuff) will die if it isn't both maintained locally where it lives in the computer ecosystem it is run or become unable to compete overall with other code trying to fill the same niche through the source code improvement process.

Apache and Open Source made the evolution of software able to operate more like the evolution of living organisms and gave a difference between the good old monoploid - the host continues it's own line to a diploid/sexual recombinant model. So even if it is free it is also free to expand and change rapidly. It will be interesting to see the long term war of the worlds between the open source software and tools and the Microsoft tools. At some point there might be a tipping point, which is what the Open Source folks are hoping for, where the balance of power shifts away from Microsoft. But for now it is safe to expect that if you want to sell desktop software then sending checks to Redmond is the best way to pull it off.

Posted by Dan Housman at 02:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sarah and I tried to see Charlie and the Chocolate factory at the IMAX theatre on the way back from Gloucester last weekend. We had gone to Gloucester to see Matt and Kate in their natural summer habitat after having missed their annual party the week before. I am batting .000 with regards to the Gate House party due to a trip last year to Japan and a wedding in Long Island this year.

The Swift house in Gloucester is on the waterfront and is a shell of the former glory of the house that once was on the property. The first main house was demolished in 1972 after about fifty years of fighting with New England storms. There was another small house that once was on the property that was destroyed during The Perfect Storm. So Matt and Kate are staying in the remaining house, the Gate House that used to be the little one at the entrance to the property. When we arrived we couldn’t find people at first but it turned out that folks were at a table by the ocean at the end of a winding grass walkway defined among the grass and sea rubble by a series of stones.

One of Matt’s friends, who is a poet was there with his girlfriend. We got into a nice long debate by the water about whether bicycles are a better mode of city transportation than automobiles for city transportation. The poet was good at presidential impersonations and had a long list of opinions about politics including that George Bush was smart enough to pronounce the word nuclear properly but that he pronounced it newcular to appeal to voters in blue collar jobs despite his very rich boy background. The poet also thought that Hillary Rodham Clinton was the only possible candidate that the DNC would bring as a presidential candidate in 2008.

Kate was worried about her art homework project due Monday where she needed to interpret a story written by a fellow classmate. The story was about a child’s blanket/blanky and the poet gave a full red pen mark-up. He wasn’t fond of it and thought that deceptively anthropomorphizing objects and then later trying to appear clever by revealing that the person is really a beloved object was something that should be beaten out in seventh grade. He gave it a name like fools deception.

The only drawback of the ocean property in the northeast is that it lies near marsh. The mosquitoes are especially fierce and represent a good portion of the variation in the mosquito kingdom. I got a good look at one little mosquito biting my arm and she had yellow racing stripes. Sarah and I slept in a twin bed. In the past this has worked well for us but with the extra half person growing inside of Sarah we kept trying to find a comfortable equilibrium in the bed but were tossing most of the time. At one point of getting bitten we turned on the light and it was like a scene out of a B rated horror movie where worms suddenly come to life after an electric line is left in the swamp or just an epic battle against bugs like Starship Troopers. The bugs were everywhere and the room was filled with a swarm of enemy bugs trying to slowly attack us in our sleep. The mosquitos must have seen us as a welcome treat nicely delivered. I fought them valiantly by swinging a towel at them crushing as many as I could and then went to sleep with Sarah in the bed for 30 minutes before she moved to the other twin bed because I was snoring too loud.

In the morning when we awoke a little after noon we had a Wimbledon breakfast of berries with cream and bacon. It was quite tasty and enjoyable. We thought about flying the kite but there wasn’t any wind. So after a bit Sarah and I took a look at the tide pool that most years had been used as a swimming area but was out of commission because of a combination of low tide and a mysterious fast draining problem. Matt explained that the tide pool is mostly a natural phenomenon where the cold arctic water collects in the rocks to be warmed by the sun. To keep the water in people have plugged the draining points with concrete and rocks. Since every year storms, ice, and the tides batter the pool it develops leaks both in the natural rocks and where the concrete plugs the open holes. This year the leaks are particularly bad and they haven’t had the will to continue plugging them so the pool was empty.

This was fine as Sarah and I were just trying to walk around. We walked down some roads to a lighthouse and a break water and then lay on the break water for a while napping on a flat and wide bed that was comfortable for the two of us. When we returned Kate had been working on her art homework having decided to make a final panel in her interpretation of the blanket story that looked like a child’s drawing.

Sarah and I then tried to attend Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at the Reading IMAX on the way home. Unfortunately it was sold out but we did manage to get to see it on Monday night instead with Lisa and Dave. It struck me that the movie and most other children’s movies in America was very culturally American. Like Robots it professed the importance and high status results of being an entrepreneur. The best example of this was when Charlie had his Golden ticket in his hand and he decided he didn’t need to visit the factory since someone would pay him money for it. His grandfather’s response to it was that you should never trade a once in a lifetime opportunity for something as ordinary as money. Translation – In America you will be rewarded for being a risk taker and an entrepreneur but people who just work for money live plain and boring lives.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We have been attending a lot of weddings since Sarah and I were married. At some level it begins to feel like an anthropological survey of the rituals across cultures of modern American culture. It would be nice to sneak in a few ceremonies in India involving grooms riding in on elephants and I would have enjoyed that ritual in the Carvey backyard had it been feasible. The last two weddings we went to were church weddings. I was surprised by the amount of focus that the priests give towards the relationship between the married couple and Jesus. The Jewish weddings that I have been to don’t focus that much on having a trinity of the bride, groom, and God working together as much. But in a Christian wedding I hear statements like “Todd and Jessica and Jesus together are an unbeatable team” or “The key to a successful marriage is to let Jesus be the glue that binds you together”. It is a little hard for me not to have visions of a TV Funhouse team of the groom, bride, and Jesus fighting off the many evils of the devil, Saddam Hussein, the Joker, and prostitutes using a combination of clever Yankee/McGyver inventions combined with divine bolts of lightning and Jesus turning water into wine. But when I think deeper about this philosophy it makes sense as a working model for consensus in a family. The challenge in any organization being successful, at least according to the Jim Collins disciples who wrote Good to Great and Built to Last, is cultural unity and consistency. As an atheist I am not likely to be able to glue much together with Jesus. But I can effectively glue together my marriage and my family by first finding someone, Sarah, who shares in my cultural belief system. This wasn’t going to work with prior girlfriends either because they were too religious or didn’t believe in the same goals for our lives. So I do take something meaningful out of these different ceremonies we are attending despite not taking the literal meaning from the advice given. The important thing to do if you don’t have a Jesus is to create one, something even if it is embodied in a lawn gnome or just bedtime chatter that is a solid and clearly identifiable set of our shared system of beliefs, expectations, objectives, and to keep those things as the glue that bind us and our growing family (including the little one likely to be named Madeline Eve Housman) together.

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It was Monday night and I was on my way back from the KIS audition down at the puppet theatre. I had made the third callback along with four other folks. I was really tired from having stayed-up late creating a powerpoint presentation for an analyst at Forrester. So during the KIS audition I made what I believe to be the fatal mistake of making an offer for a scene inspired by “Bald at 15” in the foreign film exercise that related to one of the two people on stage having cancer. It was the main reason why I could justify a bald girl at 15 but afterwards I think it got me into enough trouble as an auditionee to get some black marks. The highlight of my audition was when we were playing worlds worst, but called Die, and coming-up with fake names for cereals and mine was “Chunky bits of Steve”. So it is on to another future audition. I’ll hear that I didn’t make the troupe by Wednesday. How humbling!

But I do have an audition with IB next Monday with my wonderful instructors. It was somewhat uncanny that the feedback that I got from KIS from the first two auditions was pretty much identical to the feedback that I got from the IB classes. I look out into the audience too often for approval, talk too much/mime too little, take on too many high status characters, and don’t explore a wide enough range of characters. My guess is that these things are embedded in my personality but I should try to change them for the good of my adoring fans, mainly Lisa my sister.

So I was walking home from the audition feeling that about to be rejected feeling that is similar to standing under a piano held by a fishing line. Next to the used television store/ mob front money laundering service, on the corner of Harvard and Aspinwall I saw some books in the garbage. The one that caught my eye was a big hard cover Combat and Survival book. That caught my interest and digging a little further I also found a stack of large format hard cover art books with VanGogh, Matisse, Cezanne, and Dali. So I called Sarah and grabbed the stack of books. Then I saw two boxes labeled the Playboy Centerfold Collector Cards The January Edition Collector’s Case. Since I have this belief the collector cards and beanie babies are highly desirable by crazy obsessive compulsive people on eBay I grabbed the two boxes of January edition cards.

I then tried to figure out what they were worth but it was almost impossible to do so. Instead I found some choice other items including a person who collects Alf trading cards, a useful tidbit about sugar packet collecting. Still no information on the value of my found artwork collection.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)