Hi, I’m Chin Curtain. Thanks to Red Beard and Black Beard for the invite.
Let’s start off by breaking a law. Well, a rule, yet one defended by people in uniform.
Listening to music while on an airplane during take-off.
Bilinda Butcher: The only flight attendant you'll ever need.
You’re not allowed to do this for reasons that strain credulity. In theory, the ‘signal’ from your portable device could interfere with the pilot’s ability to receive messages from air traffic control. A friend of mine who knows some stuff about computers and radio transmitters laughed along with me on this one, adding “If you start to hear even faint, static-y messages from air traffic control on your mp3 player, then, yes, you better turn it off.”
By all means, more intelligent people than I (such as pilots) can deride me in the comments section below to explain the necessity of this rule. And to clarify, if a plane ever starts to plunge toward an imminent crash due to me listening to a mp3 player, then I’ll stand up in my aisle and responsibly deliver a ‘My bad, my bad, sorry ’bout that’ apology to the terrified crowd around me.
Now, before I get into what specific take-off album is essential for your future air travel, let’s plot through how you do this. Typically, a flight attendant will announce this ‘no portable device’ rule out loud. But only a determined few will enforce it by asking you why your headphones are still on while walking by or imply you take them off.
I handle this with two simple actions. First, in preemptive anticipation of this confrontation, I pretend to listen attentively during the amusing charade of the flight attendant’s pantomimic instructions for water landings, oxygen masks and seat belts. That way, the attendant won’t notice you obliviously head-nodding to Jay-Z while staring out the window – a recipe for interrogation.
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Summer is in full swing in Washington, DC. It’s been over 90 degrees for the past week and my baking has been seriously put on hold. Not only is it just too hot to turn on the oven but it’s too hot to even eat what I usually love to bake (brownies)! So I’ve put off baking and blogging for weeks, hoping that we have an unseasonable cold streak and it’s in the 70s for the rest of the summer.
Sadly, that hasn’t happened, despite my hoping and on Friday, I was forced to turn on the oven to make a classic summer treat, Lemon Bars. The recipe was super simple and a huge hit. But this blog isn’t about lemon bars. It’s about berries, lemons and cheesecake. One of the great parts of this recipe was the hot shortbread base, on this site it is used for 4 different kinds of bars, but I’m already thinking about the different uses for it and I’m pretty sure they are endless. [click for more beard...]
In Poetics, Aristotle offers two valuable observations about the creation of art. First, and most significantly, Aristotle tells us “not to know that a hind has no horns is a less serious matter than to paint it inartistically”. In other words, it is less important for a writer not to be fully informed about the subject he is writing than it is for him to describe his subject in poor style.
Second, Aristotle offers his definition of tragedy. The ideal outcome of a tragic story, he writes, is that the protagonist will experience peripeteia (or a reversal of intention), which leads to anagnorisis (or a recognition), which in turn leaves the protagonist in a state of catastrophe and suffering. Put another way, peripeteia is the revelation that a pursuit which the protagonist believed to be in his best interests is in fact the opposite, and anagnorisis is their sudden awareness of the consequences of this reversal.
Aristotle uses the play Oedipus Rex (which Wikipedia summarizes fully here, although I would point out that they date the first production of the play as 429 BC, nearly a hundred years after Aristotle’s death) as his example. In this story Oedipus, who is made king of Thebes after defeating the Sphinx, is seeking the murderer of the former king, whom an oracle has said must be brought to justice before the pestilence plaguing the kingdom will end. The peripeteia is reached when it is revealed through Oedipus’s investigation that he himself had unknowingly murdered the former king, and the anagnorisis occurs when Oedipus then realizes that he is the murderer of his own father and the queen, was queen alongside the former king and whom Oedipus married when he assumed the throne, is his mother, which, in case you need it spelled out for you, is the catastrophic aspect of this equation. Suffering, in the form of Oedipus’s self-inflicted eye gouging, ensues soon thereafter.
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