New CanadianBaconBarbie site!!!!

Direct yourself and your browser to: http://canadianbaconbarbie.com/

My birthday present from my wonderful sister Megan and her wonderful husband Liam!!! Thank you!!!

Sorry blogger. :P

Those Crazy Swedes

I also found this vintage travel guide for Sweden, which I thought was pretty enjoyable. I've wanted to visit Sweden for a long time now, but if I have a chance to wear a red or white leotard and frolick in the grass while doing some sort of rhythmic gymanstics, then I am *definitely* on board!

I like this one because I lived in Pennsylvania for 5 years and was often in precisely this position, with two kids and a dog in the backseat of my car, all rolling about with no seat-belts. I used to have a yellow hair band and matching cardigan just like that one, and my man always wore a crisply pressed shirt and never got pissed off when we had to stop and ask for directions.

Some Maps from the Good Old Days

When people took car trips together without the aid of electronic mindnumbification devices so the kids would shut up and stop annoying them. When the friendly guy at the Esso station in a bow tie and matching cap would give you directions, and everyone had a cheerful grin rather than the pouty expressions that car trips currently evoke. I found these at the thrift store for 25 cents a piece and couldn't resist.

Wacky Stuff on Women's Bodies from The Olden Days

I was in the library today looking for some stuff on the history of women's education and got side-tracked by some weird old books on women, education, and bodies. I found this 1880 text, The Coming Woman: The Royal Road to Physical Perfection, where a lecturer and teacher of anatomy, physiology, and hygiene named Eliza Barton Lyman provides the following useful advice: (seriously. You can't make this stuff up).

1. Don't marry someone with a large brain and small neck, especially if he kind of looks like you: "Take a man and woman of equally refined nervous constitutions, with large brains, small necks and chests, weak muscles, similar color of hair, eyes, complexion and conformation of head; let them marry, and if children come, they will be puny and short-lived in most cases, intensely excitable, disposed to brain and nervous disturbances" (195).
   
2. Pregnant women should not have sex since they "as a rule, are averse to the sexual union during the period of gestation, and if a desire should be manifested at the time, it may be regarded as the result of some abnormal condition: perhaps from ulceration of the womb, leucorrhea, granulation of the vagina" (219). According to Lyman this can also cause epilepsy in the unborn child and give it a "stupid, animalized look" (221) and "the idiotic condition" (221).
   
3. Men should be forewarned that "an excessive loss of semen is just as destructive to physical, mental, and spiritual upbuilding, as a daily drainage from the arteries would be" (222). Semen is composed of "the best arterial blood" and would otherwise be directed to the brain or muscles. One ounce of semen equals 40 ounces of blood.
   
4. After a baby is born, you should coat its entire body in vaseline or, if that is not available, oil from chickens or turkeys (which is preferable to vegetable oils since it is "more penetrating and softening, and less gluey" (234).
   
5. Don't let your baby wear a diaper for too long, since this can destroy "the balance of the body" and produce "the extreme of 'toeing out,' bow legs, halting gait, etc.'" (240).
   
6. "It is the duty of every woman to make herself as attractive as possible, and thus be enabled to do a greater amount of good in the world" (298). If your husband cheats on you, it is your fault for not keeping yourself "sweet and pretty".
   

Pre-warding Part II

As a preward for sending my manuscript out on Monday. (or Tuesday. At the latest.) I checked out the following books from the library:

• Laura Esquivel - Como Agua Para Chocolate
• Cristina Garcia - A Handbook to Luck
• Mahmoud Dowlatabadi - Missing Soluch
• Neil Bissoondath - The Unyielding Clamor of the Night
• Barbara Gowdy - Helpless

Yay! Fun reading!

I also bought myself a rubber tree plant. It seemed appropriate.

Satisficing

When I was studying technical writing as an undergraduate we learned about satisficing--the tendency for readers and users of technologies to do, read, or learn just enough to perform a task satisfactorily. I've been thinking about this mainly because I'm getting ready to send my book manuscript to a publisher for review, and I'm trying to decide whether I'm being really thorough or whether I'm satisficing. I've read through the whole thing twice in the last week, once for substantive editing and once for proofreading. I'm so sick of the whole thing that I'd love just to send it out tomorrow. But part of me feels like I should read through it one more time, just to make sure I didn't miss anything. I think I should satisfice, though.

But I wonder how people to decide when to satisfice. In other words, when do you say enough is enough? Here are some examples from today's news:

• Researchers have succeeded in reawakening a severely brain-damaged person through an experimental form of surgery. The guy had been in a "minimally conscious" state for 6 years, and now he can feed himself and communicate with others. Had the doctors and scientists decided to satisfice, they would probably have figured they were doing what they can, and this guy would've stayed in his minimally conscious state forever.
  
• CNN just showed a graphic indicating that the nation's roads and bridges have received very poor grades in the past. Problems with the Interstate 35W bridge in Minnesota had been identified in 2001, according to a CNN report: "Two reports published since 2001 pointed to structural problems with the Interstate 35W bridge that collapsed Wednesday into the Mississippi River, but both reports determined the bridge was safe despite deficiencies." In other words, people were satisficing, assuming that the bridge was in good enough shape despite the structural problems.
  

But clearly, we have to satisfice sometimes, right? Otherwise we'd never get anything done. We'd be mired in miniscule details of everything, from the blueberries in our cereal (do I go through and pick out the stems?) to our work (Do I keep working for 14 hours just to make sure everything is perfect)? It seems like satisficing has to do with the rhetorical concept of kairos, or right timing--it's a sense you get of when you should keep working and when you should stop. But it's pretty hard to know whether you are stopping out of satisfaction with the job or out of laziness.

As an aside, I'm betting technical communication experts will be looking pretty carefully at the reports about the bridge problem. As was the case with the Columbia and the Challenger disasters, there are communication as well as engineering/structural problems at stake here.