Alternative Logic

            I’ll bet you saw this headline and thought, “Aha! Joni’s going to give us some examples of people not thinking clearly, like when she shares misspelled signs and such.”  Now, maybe those weren’t the exact words you were thinking, but this is what you expected right?

            That’s exactly what I’d have thought, too-- but no!  There is actually a college course by this very name.  WHO WOULD SIGN UP TO LEARN LOGIC OTHER THAN GOOD LOGIC?  Pardon me for finding irony here, but doesn’t this course sound like the very definition of NOT good logic?  

            And if my keyboard had the symbol for “not” on it, I would paste it here for your enjoyment.  Sadly, I do not have such a keyboard.  But take it from me, it looks like a fat little # 7 with a wide top.  Like a mirror image of a “divided by” thingy.

            Correction.  I just called the son who is taking this course, and learned an amazing thing.  You and I can now access the symbol for “not” by holding down the ALT key and typing 0172.  Here is what it looks like:  ¬ . ~ can also mean “not” (or “about,” which is ¬ the same thing, now, is it?)  

          

          Let me be the first to expose this course for what it really is: Thievery.  Yessir, right here in River City.  And they do call Sacramento that, from time to time.  Not Thievery, but River City. We even have a baseball team called the River Cats. 

But back to the stealing.  This said son, at UC Davis, is double majoring in geology and philosophy and the latter because he loves math and logic.  He came over, recently, and showed me HARD EVIDENCE of what I’m talking about.

These people think they can appropriate anything they want, willy nilly.  They are using not only letters and numbers, but Greek letters now, upper and lower case, the ampersand, all kinds of mathematical symbols, upside-down Vs and As, backwards Es, squares, diamonds—pillaging and plundering every which way they can.  I fully expect hearts and curly cues to be next.

And no one is stopping them.  They are snatching up all the letters and shapes we have grown up understanding, and printing up textbooks that give them whole new (and very confusing, if you ask me) meanings.  They sit around and smile at sentences like, “Only only children like only only children.”  Think about that for a few minutes and try not to get a headache.

Here is Frege, the guy who started this. 

 

And here is Kripke, the guy who began pickpocketing shapes like diamonds and squares. 

He is a philosopher who is so arrogant, that when someone suggested he get a Ph.D., he said, “Who could examine me?”  So of course he felt justified ripping off pre-schoolers’ shapes and letters.  He is the father of entitlement, I tell you. 

And now these people are writing complicated formulas that are literally Greek, mixed with diamonds and doodles.  And they’re coming over to their mother’s houses and leaving chaos in their wake. I’ll tell you what this is. ¬ fun.

I’ll tell you what is fun—seeing the look of delight on the faces of loved ones when you give them my new books for Christmas.  Check ‘em out, right here on the home page!

Do You See What I See?

            Remember the first time you saw a Rorschach Test?  It may have been in a book or movie, on a TV show, or in a classroom when someone was giving an oral report on psychology.  If you were like me, you thought, “That’s a blot of ink.”  But then, you were told that you had to see a picture in there, like finding shapes in the clouds.  Aha!  Well, you certainly couldn’t admit that it was merely spilled ink, now.  That would mean something.

Nevermind that you peeled crayons in kindergarten, and ironed them in a folded sheet of paper to make butterflies. And that this bears exactly the same level of scientific intention. You set that aside and agree to play along.  And you think, Wait-- this could become a parlor game, like charades!  This one is obviously the head of a happy cartoon cat, wearing a hat. I think he's a tabby.

And here are two dancers from a fantastic Thai production showing warriors wearing pointy helmets and waving swords, leaping towards each other in a chest bump:

And this one is obviously a hound dog's face, right after you've noticed that he's chewed up your shoes.  He's staring at you, hoping against hope, that you won't get mad at him.  See his round eyes and drooping ears?

            And then the ink blots went away, or at least faded from the intense popularity they once enjoyed.

            Now we have icons.  Whaaat?  Yes, computer icons have replaced ink blots for me.  I have discovered that common symbols on the internet, and on smart phones, do not look anything like their designers intended.  At least to me.

            For years I wondered why Go Daddy chose a goat for their mascot.  

            Yes, now I know it’s a guy with vertical hair.  But it still reminds me of a goat.  And some of these are clearly green dragonflies, right?

             I suppose if you have fantastic vision you can see two tools criss-crossing.  But when it's tiny and gray on my computer, I still see a dragonfly.

             This one is a bird's eye view of Madonna, wearing her pointy bra and fairy wings:

            This is the symbol for a Firewire connection, so I'm told:

            But to me, it looks like a map for organized shoppers.  There's a round store in the middle, and then it shows you where there are available parking spots, and which ones are already taken.

            Here’s a good one.  A box, with an arrow pointing up.  On my phone the box is an actual square. 

            Now, this could mean a rocket is taking off out of Wyoming, a fairly square-shaped state.  Or it could mean something is levitating and escaping its box (Warning: Package Contents May Evaporate?), or  it could be telling you to remove paper from your printer, to prevent overloading it. But I'm probably over thinking this.  It's probably nothing more than a pat on the back, like those “Go Straight Forward” street signs with an arrow pointing up. 
            I thought I was alone in this problem of seeing symbols in symbols, but then I asked St. Bob what this icon meant on his Samsung phone:

 and he said he wasn't sure, but apparently jails were advertising red bikini bottoms.
 

            I can't promise you a Get Out of Jail Free card, nor a bikini bottom, but I can help with your Christmas shopping.  Order my wonderful, new book for someone you love, for Christmas.  It's a collection of wishes for every age.  Yes, it includes LDS wishes, but if you're not a Mormon you will still love the sentiments and inspiration you'll find inside.  Promise.

 

          

Say It Ain't So!

                I don’t know how you felt when they announced that Pluto was no longer a planet, but I felt as if my world had been turned upside down.  More accurately, my Solar System.  You do not do this to someone who spent hours in the third grade, making a mobile of little papier mache planets, and then watching them above her bed, turning in the moonlight.

                Facts have nothing to do with it.  It’s change that’s the problem.  So if you struggle with change, as I do, stop reading now.  If you feel daring and confident, proceed.  But remember, you were warned.  The following are five things you thought were so, but are not:

                German Chocolate Cake isn’t German.  150 years ago a chocolatier named Sam German came up with a baking bar called "BAKER'S German's Sweet Chocolate."   A hundred years later, when a woman in Texas sent a recipe using German’s  Sweet Chocolate to a Dallas newspaper, it went viral (well, as viral as a thing could be in 1957), and other newspapers printed it without the apostrophe and the s.  Hence, German Chocolate Cake.

                Platinum is actually very dull.  Yep, this pricey, shiny metal is dull as dirt in its natural state.  Its rarity makes it valuable.  And then you buff it up, of course.   But unlike gold and several other metals, this one does not sparkle in the least.

                Despite what you heard in The Lion King, stars—including our sun—are not burning balls of gas.  They’re plasma, not gas, and it’s fusion, not fire.  This is not the plasma you find in blood; it’s a fourth state of matter and fusion makes it glow.  I know, I know—I can hear you gasping through my computer monitor.

                Tin cans are not made of tin.  They are made of aluminum.  Tin is too rare and expensive these days, so it’s usually combined with other metals to make an alloy, and while it’s still used to preserve food, it is not on your supermarket shelf with a Del Monte label attached.  Oh, and this one’s a double: Goats do not eat tin cans.  Nor clothing, nor tires.  Goats are, in fact, picky eaters and may chew on something inedible, out of curiosity, but they won’t actually eat it.

                 Play Doh doesn’t just happen to smell that way from the ingredients which were used to make it.  Nope, they added that scent artificially and on purpose.  And they weren’t even trying to create a toy; they were trying to make wallpaper cleaner.  St. Bob, always eager to chime in, says he doesn’t think Plato got to vote on it, either.  The nerve.

                Play Doh, Pluto, Plasma—it’s all too confusing for someone who still misses the retired Crayola colors of orange red, maize, and teal blue.  And Twinkies were nearly extinct—remember dodging that bullet?  

Whew.  Just as long as there are Twinkies, I think I can cope with the rest.

Get your Christmas shopping done early!  Check out my 3 newest books and you’ll find something for everyone—a funny chick lit one, an adventure/romance, and a literary novel.  Kindle OR hard copies. And don’t forget one hot off the presses—Wishes for the LDS Child, available here.

Skin in the Game

            We humans spend far too much time thinking about our skin.  Yes, it’s our largest organ, and yes, we see it every time we look into the mirror, but--- okay, it’s hard not to see new wrinkles and spots, hard not to shell out money for products which promise to reverse the very laws of gravity. 

 

            Most of us fall victim to the incredible promises of a customer-- or better yet, a celebrity-- who tells us this is finally the fountain of youth. Nevermind using sunscreen and drinking water, two proven ways to maintain youthful skin.  We want miracles.

     

       I was in the drugstore last week, and asked for a new skin illuminator I’d read about in a magazine.  The model in the ad certainly looked luminescent.  Or the photo shopping did.  Either way, I wanted to try it.

            “Oh, yes, right this way,” the clerk said, leading me to the cosmetics section.  “Skin eliminator?”

            Yes, that’s right.  Because we all want to eliminate our skin, right?  “No; illuminator,” I said.

            She stopped in her tracks.  “Oh, no.  We don’t have that.”

            I thanked her for her time and headed to my car.  Then I thought, You mean, they did have a skin eliminator?  I should have let her keep going so I could see this amazing product. 

            One time my daughter and I were at a beach resort, and needed to buy something at a local mall.  I had foolishly forgotten to reapply my sunscreen and was a blistering red.  

            As we headed down the mall, a couple of guys at one of those little kiosks said, “Would you like to try a skin moisturizer?”

            I told him no, thank you, but you know how these guys are.  They’ve got me in a conversation, now.  (The kids keep telling me not to answer, just to keep walking, but that seems rude, so I fall into the trap every time.)

            “Don’t you care about your skin?” he almost shouted after me.  I sighed, my face almost throbbing from the sunburn. 

Nicole turned to me. “You should have said, ‘Look at me.  Does it look like I care about my skin?’”  Excellent point.

The trick is to be smart, and keep from doing things that damage your skin in the first place.  You can spend years dodging the sun, exfoliating, fighting free radicals and eating right, but if you spend a day getting a bad sunburn, it’s like playing CandyLand.  Remember that game?  Suddenly--whoosh!—you’re back at Square One.

Incidentally, the rules of that game seem terribly unforgiving for young children, don’t you think?  Maybe you could make it an educational thing, and tell them this game is about skin care.  Symbolically. 

The real solution, of course, is to embrace our wrinkles and realize we’ve earned every one of them.  It’s a point I make in my play, “Does This Show Make My Butt Look Fat?” which exposes vanity for the senseless thing it is.  And think of the money we’ll save!

Don’t forget to check out my short YouTube Mom videos.  Just go to Bit.ly/15wMi8V  and share them with your friends!