The Great Big Sub-Urban (Online) Dictionary 1.0

"Historigorical" - A blend of historical fact and allegory.

Herbert: Do you believe the Bible is real or made up?
Fred: Hmmm.  In truth, I think the Bible is historigorical.

"Democrapitalism" - Political and economic system based on democracy-tinged capitalism.

Barack: The banks got more money, with no oversight and no strings attached.  Too big to fail, I guess.
Stewart: It's the democrapitalisic way.

"High Prick-Through-Rate" - A description of an online post or article that is intentionally inflammatory or controversial for the express purpose of generating page views.

Cindy: Man, that article pissed me off.  So polarizing.  Misleading offensive title.  No supporting evidence. And the point of view smacks of generating controversy for the sake of controversy.
Biff: I agree.  High Prick-Through-Rate though.

Thanksgiving 2014

Thanksgiving

Any number of ways to go here.

• Poke fun at ourselves for our gluttony and the watching of football.
•  Mock dysfunctional - except of course for mine - family dynamics.
•  Historical criticism of celebrating for the extermination of our neighbors (rather than being exterminated by them).
•  Rail against the commercial aspects of our holiday - the brutal consumer-on-consumer violence of the now-creeping-to-Thursday Black Friday.
•  Revel in homey warming foods and the smells of our kitchens.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. 

No matter the flawed historical roots and the commercialized holiday creepiness, its a feel good pause. The season, leafy colorful autumn. The smells from the kitchen. Surrounded by family. Going to the Parade with my son, warm cider thermoses in hand. Frying a Turkey with my brother. A buzzy noisy crowd around the table. Throwing a football around. Lounging.

And we are all sharing some variant of this together with our friends and families. 

So to all my friends, wishing you a happy Thanksgiving.

My Manly Horoscope: Outrageous, Inscrutable, Irrepressible Joy, With Just a Dash of Meekness

The Good Men Project has published a short piece I wrote on masculinity and horoscopes.  Sort of.

Laurenisms - Messing with Me

After I returned from a 10 day business trip to Singapore and Korea:

Me: "I really missed you a lot."

Lauren: "Me too. I was crying everyday."

Me: "Really?"

Lauren (smiling): "No. But I just said that to make you feel good and so you don't go away again."

Laurenisms - Wisdom

Said by my daughter to my son over lunch today:

"Just because you wear a men's size shirt doesn't make you a man."

Oh man. 
Oh snap.  

Truth.

Texting with the Kid (110720113)

Texting with the Kid:

(Allowing him to make my NFL picks for the week):

Me: pick wisely my son

JK: will do my dad. obe won canobi.

*   *   *

Me: if you win the week I'll give you five bucks

JK: $10

Me: don't push it kid

*   *   *

JK: $7 and we change the login from mikeykaz to jakeykaz

Me: dude. no.

JK: pretty please with a cherry on top

Inspiration from Paulo Coelho

"At every moment in our lives, we all have one foot in a fairy tale and the other in the abyss."-- Paulo Coelho

Daydreaming: The 501(c)(3) Justice League

What if all of the talented, creative dedicated people that I know who are focusing their time and energy on various social good causes through their non-profits, got together and picked one cause - the one with the most important widest ranging impact on the world - and joined forces, talents, and networks to create a sort of 501(c)(3) Justice League ?!

What could we build?

I'll give you that its not an idea without its problems:

• Limited seats for women - slim pickings after Wonder Women
• The Maginot Line between DC Comics and Marvel Comics would have to be crossed in order to bring in au currant superheroes like Thor, IronMan, and the X Men.
• Not enough room in the Invisible Jet for everyone to get around.
• Someone would get stuck as AquaMan.  Not my problem, as long as I get to be Flash... (AH-AH!!)

Its crazy.  But it might just be crazy enough to work.

The 501(c)(3) Justice League.  Now accepting applications....

Masculinity. In seventeen syllables.

The Good Men Project has published a haiku that I submitted on the subject of masculinity.

Wisdom on Life and Happiness Dispensed by Maria Popova

Maria Popova writes a weekly column called Brain Pickings for the last seven years.  What follows is the best of her ideas.  Read, think and be happy:

1. Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind. Cultivate that capacity for“negative capability.” We live in a culture where one of the greatest social disgraces is not having an opinion, so we often form our “opinions” based on superficial impressions or the borrowed ideas of others, without investing the time and thought that cultivating true conviction necessitates. We then go around asserting these donned opinions and clinging to them as anchors to our own reality. It’s enormously disorienting to simply say, “I don’t know.” But it’s infinitely more rewarding to understand than to be right — even if that means changing your mind about a topic, an ideology, or, above all, yourself.
2. Do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone. As Paul Graham observed, “prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.” Those extrinsic motivators are fine and can feel life-affirming in the moment, but they ultimately don’t make it thrilling to get up in the morning and gratifying to go to sleep at night — and, in fact, they can often distract and detract from the things that do offer those deeper rewards.
3. Be generous. Be generous with your time and your resources and with giving credit and, especially, with your words. It’s so much easier to be critic than a celebrator. Always remember there is a human being on the other end of every exchange and behind every cultural artifact being critiqued. To understand and be understood, those are among life’s greatest gifts, and every interaction is an opportunity to exchange them.
4. Build pockets of stillness into your life. Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going nowhere in particular. There is a creative purpose to daydreaming, even to boredom. The best ideas come to us when we stop actively trying to coax the muse into manifesting and let the fragments of experience float around our unconscious mind in order to click into new combinations. Without this essential stage of unconscious processing, the entire flow of the creative process is broken.
   Most importantly, sleep. Besides being the greatest creative aphrodisiac, sleep also affects our every waking moment, dictates our social rhythm, and even mediates our negative moods. Be as religious and disciplined about your sleep as you are about your work. We tend to wear our ability to get by on little sleep as some sort of badge of honor that validates our work ethic. But what it really is is a profound failure of self-respect and of priorities. What could possibly be more important than your health and your sanity, from which all else springs?
5. When people tell you who they are, Maya Angelou famously advised, believe them. Just as importantly, however, when people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them. You are the only custodian of your own integrity, and the assumptions made by those that misunderstand who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about you.
6. Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity. Ours is a culture that measures our worth as human beings by our efficiency, our earnings, our ability to perform this or that. The cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living — for, as Annie Dillard memorably put it, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
7. “Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time.” This is borrowed from the wise and wonderful Debbie Millman, for it’s hard to better capture something so fundamental yet so impatiently overlooked in our culture of immediacy. The myth of the overnight success is just that — a myth — as well as a reminder that our present definition of success needs serious retuning. As I’ve reflected elsewhere, the flower doesn’t go from bud to blossom in one spritely burst and yet, as a culture, we’re disinterested in the tedium of the blossoming. But that’s where all the real magic unfolds in the making of one’s character and destiny.