Odysseus and Ulysses

Odysseus, in Book 10 of Stanley Lombardo's Odyssey:

"We're in a really tight spot."

Ulysses Everett McGill, trapped in the burning barn in O Brother, Where Art Thou?:

"We're in a tight spot."

Stanley Lombardo thinks it's a coincidence. If so, it's a wonderful one, with the translator's American idiom turning up in a movie that itself translates Homer's story into an American one.

Don't eat the yellow snow

Somehow I think that Odysseus (engineer of a clever exit from Polyphemus' cave) would be impressed by this guy:

A Slovak man trapped in his car under an avalanche freed himself by drinking 60 bottles of beer and urinating on the snow to melt it.

Rescue teams found Richard Kral drunk and staggering along a mountain path four days after his Audi car was buried in the Slovak Tatra mountains. He told them that after the avalanche, he had opened his car window and tried to dig his way out. But as he dug with his hands, he realised the snow would fill his car before he managed to break through.

He had 60 half-litre bottles of beer in his car as he was going on holiday, and after cracking one open to think about the problem he realised he could urinate on the snow to melt it, local media reported.

Click here to see the full article.

Higher Ed., Inc.

From "Higher Ed., Inc.," by James B. Twitchell:

Hardly anyone in Higher Ed, Inc., cares about what is taught, because that is not our charge. We are not in the business of transmitting what E. D. Hirsch would call cultural literacy; nor are we in the business of teaching the difference between the right word and the almost right word, as Mark Twain might have thought important. We’re in the business of creating a total environment, delivering an experience, gaining satisfied customers, and applying the "smart" stamp when they head for the exits. The classroom reflects this. Our real business is being transacted elsewhere on campus.

Click here for the full article.

Post-It note update

I knew it was too good to be true. My friend Martha Lhamon writes

Sorry to tell you that I've been shopping with post-it notes on my wallet, and then on the shopping cart, and then dropped in the trash on the way out--for years.

So I'm not the inventor of this shopping strategy (not that I really thought I was).

But now I know how Homer Simpson felt when he discovered that Thomas Edison was the inventor of the six-legged chair.

Getting organized with simple tools, part 1

Teaching involves keeping track of countless smaller tasks--look up this word, check this quote in French, type this handout, make this assignment, write a letter of recommendation, get stuff xeroxed, check the library reserve list, come in at 4:15 for a meeting, add this link to the blog; many larger tasks--read the next ten chapters, make the final exam; and countless pieces of paper (for me, quizzes alone are 225 pieces of paper a week).

Over the past few months I've been experimenting with different ways to stay organized. What got me started was reading about and then reading a book by David Allen, Getting Things Done. I've yet to really put GTD into practice (it's like the organizing equivalent of extreme sports). What I've come to realize though is that getting things done depends to a great degree on getting the right tools, the "right" tools being simply the ones that work best for you. Here are some helpful suggestions about finding tools that will work well for you.

Links » Getting organized with simple tools: Part 2, 3, 4, 5

Getting organized . . . part 2

Consider a datebook. Paper is endlessly formattable--you can use different color inks, boxes, and underlining to keep track of things. If your stuff for a day is going to overflow the allotted space, you can use a Post-It note to accommodate the overflow.

If you're sick of standard student planners and spiral bindings, you might want to look at The Daily Planner, a great source of datebooks and other stationery items. Datebooks from Exacompta, Letts, and Quo Vadis are especially well-designed (and not very expensive). Bookstores and office-supply stores are also good sources. Just buying a datebook that you really like can inspire you to stay more organized.

If you have many meetings and appointments to keep track of, choose a datebook that breaks the day into hours. If not, choose something more flexible, with blank or ruled pages to write on. And choose something that you can easily carry with you.

One obvious but very useful suggestion: Don't use a datebook only to keep track of appointments and meetings and due dates. Use it to list the things you need to do and when you're going to do them. A running to-do list can make a great difference in keeping up with your responsibilities. (Much better than turning the page and suddenly seeing that there's a paper due--something that you wrote in a week ago and forgot about.)

One way to make a genuinely useful to-do list is by breaking down a project into small, do-able parts. Not write research paper but go to library to find sources, organize by call number, read first five and take notes, finish other sources, organize stuff on computer, check bibliography format, and so on. Write research paper isn't really a do-able task for anyone. But all of the above are very do-able, and they give you the satisfaction of crossing things off and making progress. (This general strategy is a major theme in David Allen's book; the example is mine.)

One more thing--use your datebook as a backup for phone numbers. (Many datebooks have pages for addresses in the back.) When a cell-phone goes on the blink and you can't get to your numbers, you'll be glad that you have a paper backup.

Links » Getting organized with simple tools: Part 1, 3, 4, 5

Getting organized . . . part 3

Here's an alternative to the conventional datebook: Use a small notebook.

I've recently become hooked on Moleskine ("moleskin") notebooks. It's really pronounced "mohl a skeen a," but if you ask for them by that name, you're liable to get funny looks. These are beautifully made notebooks, with oilcloth covers, acid-free paper, an expanding pocket in the back (great place to keep receipts, etc.), a ribbon to mark your place, and an elastic band to keep the book closed. Moleskines come in various sizes, with ruled, squared, or blank pages. You can find Moleskines at Amazon, in Borders stores, and in art-supply and stationery stores.

The hype for Moleskines is a bit much (the maker's claims that van Gogh and Hemingway used these very notebooks are somewhat fanciful), but the notebooks themselves are wonderful things. They're more flexible than datebooks, as you can divide up the pages in any way you like. I'm currently using a Moleskine to keep track of to-do items, a half-page per day. It almost goes without saying that this sort of notebook is ideal if you keep a journal.

If you browse on-line, you'll find a whole world of happy people devoted to Moleskines. Look, for instance, at Moleskinerie, at Journalismo, or at this post from the blog 43 Folders. Reading such stuff makes me realize that no matter how nerdy I might think I am, I still have a long way to go.

Links » Getting organized with simple tools: Part 1, 2, 4, 5

Getting organized . . . part 4

Here's an alternative to paper-based organizing: use a Palm.

A Palm gadget can be a tremendously useful tool. (I take the superiority of the Palm to the Pocket PC for granted; if you want some arguments one way or the other, you can easily find them on-line.)

The great advantage of a Palm gadget over paper is depth. That little slab of metal and plastic holds a datebook that stretches for years into the past and future, an address book that can be organized into multiple categories of your design, to-do lists (also in multiple categories of your design), a notepad, and so on. There are countless add-on programs, many of them free, almost all of them tiny and almost instantly downloadable. And the Palm syncs its content with your computer, so you always have a backup. If you use Outlook, a Palm will sync with that, or you can use the Palm Desktop (which comes with the Palm). You can, of course, also work with Outlook or the Palm Desktop and sync its content to the Palm.

To me a Palm is really a digital Swiss Army knife. I've used my Palm to write Microsoft Word documents, tune my guitar, store web pages and photos, store Adobe files, keep syllabi and course schedules, and keep track of books and records and movies to look for. The only real disadvantage of the Palm is that putting stuff in and taking stuff out is not as immediate as it is with paper. You know what I mean if you've ever seen someone "jot down" a phone number in a Palm--paper is a lot quicker. And you can't quite thumb through Palm pages in the way that you can thumb through pages in a datebook. But writing with a Palm stylus or the on-screen keyboard is not very difficult, and the tradeoff in speed might be far outweighed by the many ways in which a Palm can be useful.

Links » Getting organized with simple tools: Part 1, 2, 3, 5

Getting organized . . . part 5

Finally, here are analog and digital tools together.

Post-It notes are almost too obvious to suggest. But here are a couple of less obvious ways to use them:

Keep a few on the inside of a notebook cover, on the back pages of a datebook, and so on. You now have an always accessible way to mark pages, leave notes on doors, and so on.

Use them for grocery shopping. Write your list on a Post-It and stick it on your wallet. When you get to the store, stick the Post-It to the handle of your shopping cart. When you're done, throw the Post-It in the trash.

I first thought to manage a shopping list in this way a couple of weeks ago. It seems so obvious! But I've never seen anyone else do it (my wife assures me that, yes, I have invented this way of shopping). It's a great way to keep your hands free and not have to wonder what aisle you left your list in.

Digital notes are also quite handy on your computer screen. There are several programs that create them; I like the free program ATnotes, which comes with a little desktop calendar too. You can use digital notes to keep track of things that are important to everyone in the house ("Return dvds by Thursday") and to make a running grocery list ("Buy salt"--because who remembers to buy salt?).

You can also use digital notes to keep track of chores. Say that four people are taking turns with the dishes. Make a note with the days of the week in a vertical column and, next to it, another note with the dish-doers' names in a column (repeat the names several times). Now, if you move the note with the names up and down, you have a perpetual calendar and no question as to whose night it is to do dishes. As you may suspect, this system is in use en mi casa.

You can also use digital notes to keep useful and inspiring words on your desktop, which isn't a bad thing to do if you're trying to get things done. (I have words from the Tao and from Aristotle on my desktop as I'm typing.)

So there are five simple tools. Except for the Palm, they can be had for relatively little money, and they might help a lot in your efforts to get and stay organized. Find what works best for you, keep your tools available, so that you can really use them, and get things done!

Links » Getting organized with simple tools: Part 1, 2, 3, 4

How to improve writing (no. 3 in a series)

Today's example, a newspaper headline, reporting on the lack of student attendance at a One Book, One Campus discussion:

One Book draws less than one student

The writer is clearly aiming for comic effect, but what does "less than one" mean? A less awkward headline:

One Book, no students

Too bad that it wasn't possible to write "One Book draws overflow student crowd." That's a headline I'd like to see.

Link » Other How to improve writing posts, via Pinboard