Footle and Grok

Messing about with empathy

Wisdom for the New Year

Posted on by Jennifer Vandenberg

Happy Lunar New Year!!!

It is now the year of the Rat. I hope you have a year of health and prosperity.

To help you have a great year, I found some Chinese proverbs from Wise Old Sayings. Add these to your collection and be like the Rat, a clever and quick thinker.

Chinese Sayings for Lunar Year 4717

  • If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow.
  • Adapt the remedy to the disease.
  • One generation plants the trees, another gets the shade.
  • Control your emotions or they will control you.
  • It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.
  • He who takes medicine and neglects to diet wastes the skill of his doctors.
  • A wise man adapts himself to circumstances, as water shapes itself to the vessel that contains it.
  • Teachers open the doors, but you must enter by yourself.
  • Every smile makes you a day younger.
  • Continually give, continually gain.

A great challenge to plan for (someday and much slower)

Posted on by Jennifer Vandenberg

I just finished listening to North: Finding My Way While Running the Appalachian Trail* by Scott and Jenny Jurek.

If you don’t know Scott, he is an ultra-marathoner who broke the northbound, supported AT record in 2015. He didn’t keep the record for long. Instead, Scott helped Karl Meltzer, a friend who had supported him in 2015, set a southbound, supported AT record in 2016.

I’d like to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail someday. I’m not sure whether I want to do it northbound or southbound, as both directions have positives and negatives. I thought I would do when I turned 50 in 2023, but I’m going to run the Great Wall of China Marathon instead.

Scott finished the trail in 46 days. The current, supported, northbound, AT record is 41 days. That’s amazing. The trail is about 2,200 miles long, goes through 14 states, and gains and loses more than 89 miles in elevation. It takes an average of 165 days to complete the thru-hike (that is a half-marathon a day.)  The amount of planning needed would be huge, but it would be a fantastic project.

North* is a great book, although I admit I liked the end better than the beginning. As with many running books, it is a quasi-memoir and deals with personal problems. If you want to read a more light-hearted, yet just as heart-stopping a book about the Appalachain Trail, check out A Walk In the Woods* by Bill Bryson. (Or watch the movie, but the book is much better.)

What do you think about taking six months to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail? Would you do it?

*Amazon affiliate links

“Save the Cat” still works (at least for me)

Posted on by Jennifer Vandenberg

First of all, I’m not into anti-hero stories.

There are a few exceptions, but if I can’t root for the main character, then I probably won’t like the book or movie. An easy way to gain my sympathy is a story technique called “Save the Cat.” Have the main character, no matter how evil they are supposed to be, do something kind for an unimportant reason. In some movies, such as the 2004 Hellboy*, the main character literally saves a box of kittens. In other cases, it can be more subtle. In Star Wars VII, The Force Awakens, Rey rescues BB-8. She didn’t have to and had no reason to, but it was her “Save the Cat” moment, and we automatically want her to win.

I watched Ocean’s 8 for the first time last night. I really liked Ocean’s 11 (the George Clooney version. We won’t discuss the horrible Frank Sinatra version.) and didn’t mind Ocean’s 12. I didn’t think I would like Ocean’s 8 as much, but I was surprised at how much I didn’t like it.

Technically, these women are thieves, so there is no reason to like them, but if Sandra Bullock had had a “Save the Cat” moment, I would have gotten behind her plan. But she didn’t. Even worse, she took advantage of customer service people who were doing their job and doing it well. Since I have worked in customer service for many years, I hated Sanda Bullock’s character.

I liked a couple of the secondary characters and ended up really liking one character that I thought was just a pawn. Overall the movie wasn’t bad, but I won’t be seeing it again because I had no connection to the characters.

“Save the Cat” isn’t always necessary, and anti-heroes are important characters, but for me, showing the good in a bad character can make me relate to them. Otherwise, they are just black or white, and there is always the Marvel movies instead.

(I guess in a roundabout way, this is a review of Ocean’s 8. It was just okay, and I’m glad I got it from the library for free.)

*All links are Amazon affiliate links

Dumb questions

Posted on by Jennifer Vandenberg

Today is Answer Your Cat’s Questions Day (which is a bizarre holiday idea.)

I have three kittens as all my readers know, and honestly, I don’t want to answer their questions. They’d probably ask things like, “Why can’t I go outside even though it scares me?” or “Why can’t I destroy the couch/carpeting/paperwork?”

The answer to these questions should be obvious. (The answer is “Because I said so” in case it wasn’t obvious.)

Now, if they asked me, “Can I go on vacation with you?” or “Can I sleep with you if I promise to be calm?” I would gladly answer, “Yes!”

But I know my cats, and the only thing going through their minds are, “What can I get away with?” They already know the answer is “nothing” because I am always watching.

Still, they are cute, and it might be fun to have a conversation with them. However, I want to ask my kittens a few questions of my own, like “I know you know your names, why don’t you respond when I use them?” and “You know you’re NOT supposed to get on the counter (I can tell this by their guilty faces), so why do you?”

They probably think these are dumb questions, but I feel knowing the answers would improve our relationship. I guess I’ll never know because unless Phineas and Ferb bring their animal translation machine over to my house, the cats and I are going to continue to befuddle each other.

IMG_7232~photo
Chewie, why are you sitting on Hela and Alfred?

Thank my cat

Posted on by Jennifer Vandenberg

Cats love laptops.

Every cat I’ve had loved to either walk across my laptop or lay on the keyboard. Nowadays, I turn off my computer whenever I am not using it so that my three kittens can’t delete anything important (this happened with a previous cat.)

However, when I’m actually using my laptop, I move the cats away from the keyboard and plead with them to walk behind the screen, not in front of it.

Still, things happen, sometimes bad, sometimes neutral, sometimes good. Last week, Hela stepped on my keyboard, and a screen popped up. It was shortcuts for Gmail. Thanks, kitty.

The keyboard shortcuts aren’t that useful for me, but the phone shortcuts are neat. I’m sharing this link so you can learn a helpful shortcut too. Thank my cat.

IMG_7056~photo
You’re welcome, Mom!!!

 

What he really said

Posted on by Jennifer Vandenberg

Benjamin Franklin’s birthday was last Friday.

I talked about some of his fun inventions on Friday’s podcast, and I won’t repeat that here. Instead, I want to expand one of his quotes.

On Facebook, I saw several memes of the following quote.

tumblr_me0mb9M9YK1rj11who1_500_large

That is only the back half of that quote. I think the entire quote is much more poignant and meaningful. Plus, it’s a little gross.

Franklin quote

Feel free to share this meme on your social media to celebrate this wise and witty founding father.

The perfect tagline

Posted on by Jennifer Vandenberg

I need your input.

I’ve been writing the Footle and Grok blog every day since August 2017, and last December, I started the Footle and Grok podcast. For the last 2 1/2 years, the tagline for all things Footle and Grok as been “Messing about with empathy.”

This tagline is taken from the definitions of the words footle and grok. It’s not bad, but it’s also not great, so I am hunting for a new tagline. I want something commanding with a positive message.

I’m setting up a shop on Cafepress, and this new tagline will be found on stickers, magnets, and tote bags, so it needs to be right. That’s why I need your help.

Below I have a numbered list of taglines I’ve come up with. Let me know which ones you like. If you hate them all, I’d love to know that too. If you have other ideas, I’d love to hear it. The right tagline should be pithy, memorable, and appropriate for the medium. A tough assignment and any comment is helpful.

Possible Footle & Grok taglines

  1. Be curious
  2. Embrace curiosity
  3. Embrace the why
  4. Support daily curiosity
  5. Encourage curiosity
  6. Embrace wonder
  7. Spread curiosity
  8. Never lose your curiosity

Thank you for your help.

Ready for Anything

Posted on by Jennifer Vandenberg

It’s Saturday, and it’s Winnie the Pooh Day.

There are so many facts about A. A. Milne (the author of Winnie the Pooh), the Winnie the Pooh stories, and the many Winnie the Pooh characters that it could be its own blog. I don’t want to you sit around and read about Winnie the Pooh, I want you to embrace the Winnie the Pooh way of thinking. He is known as a bear with a very little brain, but he was willing to try anything and was a caring friend to all.

“Christopher Robin was sitting outside his door, putting on his Big Boots. As soon as he saw the Big Boots, Pooh knew that an Adventure was going to happen, and he brushed the honey off his nose with the back of his paw, and spruced himself up as well as he could, so as to look Ready for Anything.”

Winnie-the-Pooh

Today, be Ready for Anything (or put the Big Boots on yourself.)

With Winnie the Pooh I’m Ready for Everything

How many words make a poem?

Posted on by Jennifer Vandenberg

I must be in a literary mood this week.

Last night, I finished a book about William Carlos Williams. I really like his poems because they are short and paint a picture. I learned two things from this book. He was life-long friends with Ezra Pound, and Ezra introduced him to imagism, the style of poetry that brought William recognition.

I had never heard of imagism, but I really like it.

Imagism was an early 20th-century style of American and English poetry which sought clarity of expression through the use of precise images. The movement involved Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Amy Lowell, and William Carlos Williams, among others.

These types of poems tend to be short. It doesn’t have to rhyme, and there are no unnecessary words. The book I read about William Carlos Williams mentioned a two-line poem that Erza Pound wrote. Of course, I had to look it up. 

In a Station of the Metro
by Ezra Pound

 The apparition of these faces in the crowd: 
 Petals on a wet, black bough.

I like that. However, this two-line poem made me wonder what the shortest poem is. According to Wikipedia, this is it. 

 Lines on the Antiquity of Microbes
 (also known simply as Fleas) 
 By Strickland Gillilan 

 Adam
 Had 'em.

There is nothing wrong with a long poem, but short poems can make their point immediately, and in today’s busy world can be easier to memorize. Share your favorite poem in the comments. Maybe I’ll discover more to like about poetry.

When robotics make us human

Posted on by Jennifer Vandenberg

Every time I run, I’m grateful for my legs and feet.

I know that if something happened, and I lost a limb, I would embrace whatever technology allowed me to live a life worth living. I’m always impressed by runners like Marko Cheseto, who break records on blades and provide inspiration to everyone. But, everything I had read before now talked about the limitations of prosthetics.

Then I saw a TED Talk by Hugh Herr. This video was mentioned in the back of the book I recommended in yesterday’s post, Broken Places, & Outer Spaces.* The technology that this MIT professor and his team have developed is game-changing.

I don’t want to give away too much, but I encourage you to watch to the end (it’s not that long.) The climber brought me to tears. I don’t know what the future will hold, but I believe that a lot of good will come from those people who don’t let today’s limitations hold them back.

*Amazon affiliate link