Fortune Cookies

 All time fortune cookie:
The great pleasure in life 
is doing what people say you cannot do.


 Fortune cookie of the week:
A person of words and not of deeds
is like a garden full of weeds.


 Watching the sunrise outdoors statistically increases your odds of having a good day. And needing a nap after lunch. Firefox.7.11.17

The plural of anecdote is not data. :)

Tara Goddard
@GoddardTara

Don't tell me why it won't work.
Tell me what you tried that didn't work.
Carlin Black, DuPont, 1966 

To try and fail is at least to learn; 

to fail to try is to suffer the inestimable loss of what might have been.

 Chester Barnard

Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized.  
Daniel_Burnham

But I have no beliefs. Belief gets in the way of learning.
Lazarus Long

It's not the mistakes that count,
it's what you do after them that counts.
-Thelonious Monk

Thanks Paige Wroble for the find.

The weather right now in Seattle is cold and rainy.
It will get better--about April.
Horizon Air preflight announcement.

If it is to be it is up to me to do it.
John Tee-Van

 He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes;
He who does not ask a question remains a fool forever.

There are two kinds of men who never amount to much:
Those who cannot do what they are told, and those who can do nothing else
Cyrus H.K.Curtis

 Wisdom is knowing what to do next;
Skill is knowing how to do it;
Virtue is doing it. 


 Learn from the mistakes of others.  
You haven't the time to make them all yourself.


 Minds are like parachutes: 
they function only when open.




"Butterflies are not insects, they are self-propelled flowers."
Captain John Sterling. The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, Robert A.
Heinlein, 1985.

 

Sprichwörter

 My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But, ah, my foes and oh, my friends--
It gives a lovely light.
Edna St. Vincent Millay 

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
James Baldwin

 

Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is
Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things,
the divine beauty of the universe.
Love that, not man apart from that,
Robinson Jeffers 

Note to self:
You can't control how other people recieve your energy.
Anything you do or say gets filtered through the lens of whatever shit they are going through at the moment.
Which is not about you.
Just keep doing your thing with as much integrity and love as possible.
- Nanca Hoffman

Posted on Facebook by The Earth Tribe:
Edit J'C


What some call luck
Is simply pluck
And doing things 
Over and over

Perseverance and skill
Courage and will
Are the four leaves
Of Luck's clover
Anon per Google


There is no such thing as luck;
There is only adequate or inadequate preparation
To cope with a statistical universe. 
Dr. Samuel C. Russell, Have Space Suit - Will Travel, RA Heinlein, 1958

The Virile Mind

One of the most striking things about the virile mind is that at the end of its thinking there is always a question mark.  The ignorant man finds it easy to convince himself that what he does not know is not worth knowing.  It is only those who are willing to go on learning, who becoome aware of how vast are the realms of to be explored beyond the farthest reach of their own understanding.
Peter Fletcher

"What makes my truth mythology and your mythology truth?"
A Hopi "Cathy"

Quoted on Facebook by friend Brian King

 “Where's your church?”

“We’re standing in it.”

“But this is a bookstore and it’s a Friday.”

“Yes, but you might also choose to see it as a cathedral of the human spirit-a storehouse consecrated to the full spectrum of human experience. Just about every idea we’ve ever had is in here somewhere. A place containing great thinking is a sacred space.”
 From Forrest Church’s A Chosen Faith

In biology when an experiment goes wrong it stinks. 

In chemistry when an experiment goes wrong something blows up. 

In physics when an experiment goes wrong nothing happens. 

Hat tip to Paul Lewis on Facebook

I like to feel that I've paid rent on the piece of earth I'm using.             Hilda Burroughs.  The Number of the Beast, R.A.Heinlein, 1980.

We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness.

Thích Nhất Hạnh

Suggested Life Celebration for J'Carlin

N.B. This post is referenced as part of my Advanced Directive which has not been needed yet (8/22/23.)  It was a hurry-up job under the gun of some grim medical procedures.  Not surviving was a real possibility and I almost didn’t.  However I beat the odds and am still around stirring things up as possible.

Any confusion as to time frame of the celebration is regretted.  For the moment at some time in the future:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As people gather play the Second movement of Bruch's third violin concerto (Arcado by preference) to include sister Janet as part of the celebration.  Encourage the who, what composer, etc speculation. No spoilers from those in the know.  After the third movement resolves the second, someone should tell the story of Janet and I having to leave home frustrated at that point and Janet calling her friend at the radio station for the ID of the out of print vinyl.  J'Carlin kept a long vigil till the CD set we just listened to was reissued ADD.

No podium speeches, but encourage everyone to tell a neighbor a story about J'Carlin that was important for them.  

After a bit of chatter have some music breaks including the Intuit and Kyrie from the Faure Requiem, the Bogoroditse from Rachmaninoff Vespers, and "Don't Stand by my Grave and Weep" from Rob Paterson's Eternal Reflections  If a choir I have been a member of would like to organize a celebratory group for the Faure and Rachmaninoff I would request that the usual gig fee be paid to the director and accompanist.  If Kevin and Alex would sing Amazing Grace for their usual gig fee it would be nice.   A reading from "Thinking on the blue roads" would be nice.  http://jcarlinbl.blogspot.com/  Kevin might read his post #4 from https://jcarlinsv.blogspot.com/2015/11/one-person-religion.html  he speaks for both of us.  Order and breaks ad lib.

When the food and drinks start someone should start a musical wine glass chorus in Celebration of Dorothy's 80th.  That should get enough stories started to make everyone enjoy the party.

I would like to continue Janet's tradition of distributing my compost to people who will take them to meaningful places and compost a wildflower.  Including the Mist trail at Yosemite. If possible near  a small bonfire in the Desolation Wilderness and the John Muir Trail. Also some dropped into the Mississippi from a bridge in Minneapolis to join Mom, Dad Janet, and anyone else who might care to join us.  

In lieu of flowers, a donation to any park conservancy, Redwood preservation non-profit,  or open space preserve would be appreciated.

A note on the "J'"  Until I left home for college I was nicknamed Joe which I never appreciated.  At Stanford I never mentioned the nickname and became known by my birth name.  Relatives and friends who knew me before tried diligently to change, but some version of Joe always came first.  Jo-Carlin, Je-Carlin, or J-Carlin.  Eventually I adopted J'Carlin as a nom-de-plume to protect my politically correct business persona. 


Note: Blog is CC3 If anyone wants to us this as a template for a Life Celebration modify at will.  

Just Do It - The Story of the ORVR Canister.

In October of 1968 General Motors had a major problem.  At the beginning of the 1970 model year, roughly September 1969, California was requiring all vehicles to have an onboard recovery for fuel vapors displaced from refueling and from evaporation while the vehicle was sitting in the sun, both of which were significant contributors to the infamous LA smog. While there were several technical solutions to the problem all had several drawbacks.  The preferred solution was a coffee can filled with activated charcoal with several ports for the gas tank, the fuel management system and other needs.  Unfortunately hot fuel vapors ate up the coffee can in short order.  A stainless steel coffee can with arc welded ports survived the hell under the hood but ate up the profits on each car.

A creative engineer at GM's Rochester Products named Jack Castellana, the inventor of the pop out cigarette lighter and the trademark small, secure GM car key used from 1960s to the invention of the chipped key, read about a heat and chemical resistant structural plastic manufactured by DuPont that he thought might be a cost effective solution to making a canister for the system.  He went to his local DuPont technical consultant who you know as J'Carlin to see if this new plastic had what it took to hold hot fuel vapor in hell, and if it could be manufactured into the elegant but complex shape required.  The short answer was technically yes, but practically there was no way to produce it in the required volume by summer of 1969.  Just the lead time on the huge injection molding machines that would be needed was several years.  And tool design and manufacture took many more months than we had.  Jack's reply was give me the technical solution and let me worry about the practical aspects.

Neither GM nor DuPont were happy about the risk involved in committing to the project but permitted preliminary design and testing to proceed without committing to production.  But GM had a huge cost driver, and DuPont had huge excess capacity in nylon production, so both Jack and I got tacit approval to proceed with the preliminary work with the proviso that it would be nice but it won't happen.  HEAR THIS you are both spinning your wheels IT WON'T FLY.

Jack asked me if I were sure I could solve the technical issues involved in production by summer 69?  I assured him that they were not trivial but known solutions existed.  He basically told me I would have to solve them as he and his boss were going to take on GM and have the plastic canister in production for the 70 model year. My immediate boss took a liberal view of "preliminary design and testing" and as long as I did not neglect my other clients, I could spend the time and money needed to support the GM project. 

Once the mockups proved themselves on the Arizona test tracks, my first technical problem was to teach a zinc die casting tool builder to build a nylon mold.  None of the nylon tool builders would take a chance on the intricate design details.  Once I explained the forces involved in molding nylon they decided they could do the job if I would help with the plastic design necessities.  We did fine except that I forgot to tell them nylon and cooling water don't mix.  This is taken for granted in plastic tool building, but I didn't know that for zinc a little bit of water overflow helps cool off everything including the moldings.  After a frantic night of rebuilding the cooling for the tool, the first shot the next day at a friendly nylon molder was perfect, all three parts of the three piece canister.  I still have that shot as a souvenir of my part of the project.  The friendly nylon molder was kept very busy on pre-production test canisters to prove the system and not incidentally the right formulation for the nylon.  It didn't take long for Jack and his boss to get their atta-boys we knew you could do it and move into production mode.  Unsurprisingly GM was able to cut into that two year line for production molding machinery to meet the model year deadline.

For my reward I got to write the material spec for GM and a nice promotion as well as the atta-boy.  I am still mad at GM for taking out the line in the spec. that the container for the nylon had to have a Z on it for the Zytel brand name DuPont used, but I got everything else including some proprietary additives and a salt and pepper mix to insure the additives were in the ultimately black molding.   After a few career building moves I was back to work at another nylon supplier and at a trade show I asked a friend who worked for a supplier of HDPE to GM about the canister. He said a high percent was grandfathered to DuPont, and the rest of them were competing for the remainder.  He also commented that he would sure like to have a word with the SOB that wrote that spec.  As he appeared to be non-violent I invited him to talk away.  That night at the bar, when he heard that the project from inquiry to production was done in 10 months, he admitted that I had earned my SOB the hard way.

The other reward was that Delco ended up supplying ORVR canister systems to the other manufacturers and most US and many foreign cars used it.  It wasn't too long before "Where is the smog" became a common tourist question in LA.  I have to admit that it is nice to see the mountains from Azusa all day long, and know that I had a part in making it happen.  

Humanism and Cancer.

From a friend's facebook post:

I have enjoyed this medium for a long time. I love you all including the asses, but no longer want to socialize here. I'm going to stick with my kind as suggested. God help you in the future with this mess.

Build your silo and kick out the asses. It is a social media. Social groups have standards of membership or they can't survive. "They drew a circle that kept me out, Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout." (Edwin Markham) And I own that circle. They are not welcome. There are times when inclusiveness fails. I never liked the end of the complete quote, 

I am a radical humanist in that all people are initially included in the humanist circle. They can opt out if they wish by behavior incompatible with humanism. This does not mean they are not still human it just means that they may need to be controlled or eliminated humanely for the protection of humanism.

Humans and humanism are prone to cancerous growths. I did not hate the cancer that was destroying my vocal instrument. But it could not be allowed to do so. The only choice was to poison all rapidly dividing cells in my body, dangerous to be sure, and in fact nearly fatal, but it was a risk I had to take to continue to enjoy my instrument. 

The cancerous cells in humanism must be treated in the same way. Do what it takes to eliminate them even if it is dangerous. If they take over the body politic humanism will be dead anyway.

Stories and Tips about Traveling for a Living.

You know you travel too much when the receptionist at the airline club greets you at 6:30am with "I see it is Omaha this week," and hands you your boarding passes.  (Before TSA.)  The club for your primary airline is a necessary investment.  On a cancelled flight the attendant said we can reroute you to fly all afternoon, or you can sit in the club for a couple of hours and get a non-stop that gets you there 15 minutes later. 

One thing I learned early on, was to stay at the same hotel chain and always ask for a right hand room.  That is the door is on the left and bed etc. on the right.  That way when you get up in the middle of the night to get rid of the used alcohol you know where the furnature is and don't run into it.  An equally important habit was to unpack as soon as I got to the hotel, hide all the evidence that it is a hotel room, and turn it into home even if it is for one night. The familiar setup of the right hand room makes it easy to forget it is just another hotel rooPm.

Packing. I always checked a medium large roller bag with all the essentials for home comfort. Casual clothes, a robe, workout gear, comfortable jeans, Concert wear, see below, a hoodie, PJs if you wear them and anything else you might need. This gets cleaned/laundered on 2 day stays.  Religiously.

Business wear, including rain gear, all wash and wear, goes into a hard side overhead carry-on with hygene necessities.  Underseat soft side all on board necessities. 

 If you are so inclined take advantage of any cultural opportunities, preferably with a client or acquaintance, but solo if necessary. You can usually turn a seat mate into an acquaintance with a little effort or a drink at intermission.  This does not include touristy stuff. 

 A fun NYC Blizzard memory was one I missed. I barely made a plane in Lincoln Nebraska when the gate agent asked if I wanted to spend the weekend in Lincoln or Chicago. I asked why and he said they have just shut down the entire East Coast. I called my favorite hotel at ORD and booked a room with key at Concierge Desk. They asked on Fri? Why? I told them EC shut down. Some shouting on the other end of the line. When I got to the concierge he said thanks to you we were able to keep the day shift on overtime, here is your key to the Luxury Suite as a reward. It was there I listened to Mayor Koch tell everybody to stay home and have a weekend block party.

  

Why Reading is Fundamental.

This post was stimulated by the following retweet.

Jonathan Korman

3 hrs · 

Twitter

· 

Retweeted Naval Ravikant (@naval):

Text is precise, compact, indexable, transmissible, translatable, asynchronous & quick to absorb. Intelligent, busy people prefer text.

@naval is obviously talking about SMS text, but it is even more apt for extended texts. Please note the efficiency of a good tweet.  (If I had more time I might use Twitter.)
 

People have always asked me why I never got into movies, YouTube (except for music), or TV especially movies and TV shows based on books I have read and liked.
The most important reason is that I learned to read before I had even heard about movies and TV which hadn't become popular yet.  I read everything I could get my hands on. I once had a race down a school library book shelf with another reader friend of mine.  I had an adult library card at 8 yo. courtesy of my activist mother who went to bat for me at the local library which I used almost exclusively as the young adult section books were off limits to my elementary card.  I frequently strayed into the adult fiction section and found that I could learn about important social issues there more efficiently than in the news or the history sections.  A good fiction author must write believable stuff in order to sell no matter what the genre.

For me the most important advantage of text is that you must supply your own emotional context to text.  Visual and even aural media are designed to manipulate the emotional state of the consumer.  Humans are story driven, and the invention of writing gave readers much more control over the emotional impact of the story.  Not completely, of course, a good writer can influence the emotional content of his words, but the reader has a chance to process that emotional content at leisure if desired.

Another advantage of text is that it clearly indicates the intelligence, education, and sophistication of the writer by asynchronous textual analysis.  A speech or video may sound plausible, but analysis of the transcript is critical to evaluating the plausibility of the actor.

Choral CV

K-8 choir starting 4^th grade.  First solo 4^th boy sop.  Voice never broke just moved down through the parts.

Elite Church Choir 6-12.  Various parts.

Elite High School A Capella Choir.  One of two freshmen admitted. 

Highlight: Memorial Day concert ending with Faure Requiem.  Due to intense programming no applause was requested.  At the end the audience filed out in complete science. 

Stanford All University Chorus 4 years undergrad, 2 years Grad.  Good chorus nothing special

Five years not singing due to heavy travel for work but something definitely missing. 

New York Choral Society.  Top non-professional choir in NYC.  Frequent performances with visiting orchestras, Beethoven 9^th,  Mahler 2^nd , Handel Messiah repertoire pieces.  Chorus 1971 to 1979.  On working board 1972 to 1979. Normal venue Carnegie Hall.  We performed almost all of the Choral Standards including the big 5 Requiems and the usual Masses.

Highlights.

·         Beethoven Missa Solemnis under Roger Wagner, Bob DeCormier, and Robert Shaw.

·         Kodali Kallo Dances and Martinu Military Mass under DeCormier

·         Chorus for the Peter, Paul and Mary Chanukah-Holiday concert which was later televised as a PBS Special.  Look for the guy with the fake snow piling up on his tux.

·         Bernstein Chichester Psalms under Maestro Bernstein.

San Francisco Choral Society.  A top tier non-professional symphonic Chorus in San Francisco Bay area. Bass 1998-2005. Tenor 2006-present.  Performs standard choral repertory with emphasis on newer music.   With an annual warhorse in Davies Symphony Hall

Highlights

·         David Lang Battle Hymns: W/C Premier with active chorus, dance and children’s choir.

·         Stacy Garrop Terra Nostra: World Premier of her Modern Oratorio.

Started voice lessons for tenor soloist training 2013 with Brian Thorsett, then with Greg Wait. For the past year I have been working with Lee Strawn.  

Original publication 5/26/16