Rat runners

 I guess Freud was the guy who put psychology on the map.  Well why not, his theories were pretty lurid.  Well sex sells.  It's such a basic thing, everybody does it, more or less, but nobody wanted to talk about it.  Well it was such a touchy subject, such a sinful subject nobody wanted to say the wrong thing and run afoul of The Church.

Freud is pretty marginalized these days.  He is credited with at least getting people to talk about psychology, but again his theories, crazy talk.  

Freud did some studies I think, but mostly he was an armchair philosopher, sitting in that easy chair with a pipe in his mouth and a pot of ink and a dip pen, maybe a little vial of cocaine, on one of those little tables, and every time a good thought came to him writing it down.  

There is deductive reasoning where you just apply reason to the subject and make conclusions without ever having to leave your easy chair, then there is inductive reasoning where you go out and gather a bunch of data and then from all that information you can propose theories.

The thing about the physical universe is it is very complicated and you need more information.  All electrons are the same, but every person is different.  

Hence B F Skinner who introduced behaviorist psychology.  None of these dreamy thoughts, just the cold hard facts.  We can never know what is going on in the mind of our fellow man.  The mind is a black box into which we can never peer, so forget about that.  Behavior (i e, drool from Pavlov's dog) is the only thing we can measure so let's stick to that and forget about what is going on in the black box.

The University of Illinois in those days was a behaviorist school, Skinner all the way, (they called us, and we called ourselves, proudly) rat runners.  Basically you had hungry rats on one side and food on the other and a bunch of buttons that in the correct combination would yield access to the food, and that was basically it.

One button, experiments, two button experiments, three, four, five buttons.  You'd be surprised at how many variations there are, but they pretty much filled the curriculum.  We never did get around to boredom.  

I'll try in the next post.

How I came to study psychology

 Underneath my yearbook photo it says biochemist.  I was, of course under the sway of my hero, Isaac Asimov.  But it was hard Man.  I did okay with the lectures, with talk of valences and you know, how oxygen lacks two electrons to fill its outer ring so it hooks up with a couple lonely hydrogens and viola water.   It's all in the electrons with the elements on either end of periodic table needing only one electron to give up or one to add to have a full outer ring with no pesky extra electron all by itself.  Acids and bases, all there is too it.

Well no, actually there was a lot more to it, and a lot of that is included in lab, that smelly old place with all those weird instruments, and complicated recipes that you have to follow just so if you want to get the proper results, and that's the thing I am no good at all at.  I like theory but I am no good at all when it comes to practice.

So after a year I was out of chemistry and into math which is pretty much all theory, and I was pretty good at that.  I had a knack even if I didn't know what I was doing meant, I was just good at manipulating symbols.  

And the profs, guys with their heads in the stratosphere high above us.  Every now and then somebody would raise their hand and ask what good is all this crap, and of course it would turn out that he was an engineer and all us pure math types would snicker.  What good is all that crap?  Well what kind of question is that to ask?

Anyway because the profs had their noses in the air they had little interest in mundane things like figuring out how to grade their students so they would just give the whole class A's or B's, and that is pretty much how I was able to skate through it until my senior year when I encountered the hard nut of Math 317.  Abstract algebra, which is the kind of thing I like, but by then I was running with a dope smoking and beer drinking crowd, and I really had no time for all that crap, and this being a mandatory class the profs had to pay attention to their grading.  I took it three times before I barely passed it.  My math GPA was below C.  I could never graduate in math.

Along the way to not getting my math degree I had taken a few elective courses in psychology because they were easy and I had a good GPA in them so I switched my major to psychology.  What would I learn there about boredom?

That will have to wait for my next post because it's 6 AM and the morning is about shot.

The Bee's Knees

I've heard of the Lurie Garden but wasn't sure of its location, just that it was "downtown somewhere," probably in Grant Park.  Lot of garden plots in that neck of the woods but I'm so out of touch that Grant Park and Millennium Park are the same thing to me.  Anyhow, that's a wonderful place to soak up some of Nature's Finest and a fine stroll from Marina City.  About three-quarter mile, I think, if Google Earth can be trusted.

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A bum knee is no fun at any time and I wish Lady Beagles a pain-free recovery.  The less said about health care in this country, the better.  I recall a time when there were small hospitals all over the city, never more than a mile or two away, but they were absorbed by bigger hospitals that were in turn absorbed by even larger medical operations and who knows where it will end?  Living alone as I do, any medical emergency can be a problem if I can't get near my phone.  No easy solution except to make sure I don't need a doctor for anything, not easy these days.  But that's a rabbit hole we are all falling into and nobody wants to hear about my lumbago.

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I don't catch the connection between being a psych major and being bored.

No connection at all.  I assumed (bad move!) that a psych major would know something about boredom and what it means, its causes, blah, blah, blah.  Having taken a few psych classes myself, I got the impression that psych majors were, for lack of a better term, goofy.  No offense intended but, as the kids say, "it is what it is."

the garden report

 Sorry to hear about your no longer hypothetical wife or to be more accurate her knee.  Not to be too nosy (I say as a preamble to asking a nosy question) but does this mean a knee replacement?

Replacements, hips, knees, all the rage among our set these days, almost as commonplace as changing a tire, best wishes for Beagles and his now not hypothetical wife.

Sundaes?  Why was I talking about sundaes?  Used to be, back in the good old days when The Institute was popping like Orville Redenbacher's finest, sometimes three posts in a single day, it wasn't hard to keep up a train of thought, but at the current glacial pace it is almost a month since I wrote about sundaes, and I just don't know why.  I wrote at the time that the name change was likely due to lawyers, but revisiting the topic I find it much more complicated than I had thought.  In fact there are five origin stories, all different in the following wiki article.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundae#:~:text=Plainfield%2C%20Illinois,-Plainfield%2C%20Illinois%2C%20has&text=Sonntag%20created%20the%20dish%20%22after,and%20later%20was%20spelled%20sundae. 

Garden Report

Last fall I began visiting the Lurie Gardens on a semi regular basis and what caught my eye was all those bees.  Busy busy busy bees buzzing softly in the bee loud glade as they danced among the flowers like those bewigged and perfumed dandies among their women in those silken battleships of dresses in the halls of Versailles before The Terror came and lopped off all their heads.

Anyway I like the busy buzzy ladies.  A couple years ago I had a good sunflower crop and got bees from as far away as, well I don't know.  Last year the sunflowers came in late and didn't grow proper heads and the bees barely showed up.  So this year I wanted to plant known bee favorites, cone flowers and black eyed susans, but it turns out that they are perennials and likely won't even flower this year.  I planted them anyway since I bought the seeds and I want to see what comes out.  

And I am planting more sunflowers.  You just sprinkle the seeds, cover them up a little, give them some water and they are reaching up for the sun.  I got three or four of them from each pot, and I carefully transplanted a couple of them into other pots, five tomato varieties and one one white eggplant for adventure.  The farmers market will open Thursdays and I will be looking for exotics. 

Crazy in Cheboygan

 I haven't been online much the last couple of weeks because we are in the middle of a health care crisis here in Beaglesonia.  My wife, who no longer wants to be referred to as hypothetical, has had a bum knee for some time.  On April 30, it finally gave out on her and I had to call the paramedics to get her off the floor and haul her away to the emergency room.  We used to have a regular hospital here in Cheboygan, but a big conglomerate bought it at a bankruptcy sale and changed it into an out-patient clinic some years ago.  They still have an emergency room but if you need to be admitted to a regular hospital, they ship you off to Petoskey. This is what I thought they would do to my wife but, instead, they called me an hour later and told me to come get her.  When I arrived, she couldn't get into our truck with the help of three nurses, so they sent her home in an ambulance and told her to follow up with her primary physician.  

When they got her home, they had to carry her in with a gurney because she couldn't hardly walk, much less climb the three steps to our front door.  One of the paramedics taught her how to walk using her umbrella as a cane, which sufficed until I could buy her a regular cane later that day.  She went to see her primary physician a couple days later with the help of another ambulance crew, which cost us over $900 because it was not deemed an emergency transport under Medicare rules.  Since then, we've had people coming in from a home health care outfit which, surprisingly, Medicare does pay for 100%.  They are working on getting her ambulatory enough to go to her medical appointments in a regular car, but she's not there yet.  Meanwhile, I'm charged with looking after an invalid when I'm not in a whole lot better shape myself. 

Like I said, they took away our regular hospital some years ago, and they recently closed our local hospice house as well.  On the bright side, they have also opened a new in-patient mental health facility.  So, the bottom line is you can't be born in Cheboygan, and you can't die in Cheboygan, but you can go crazy in Cheboygan.

I seem to remember reading about the origin of the "sundae" spelling, but I don't remember where or I read it.  A long time ago, some town or county passed a law prohibiting the sale of soda on Sundays.  One enterprising soda fountain operator got around this by putting a scoop of ice cream in a glass of soda and calling it a "sundae" instead of a soda.  I don't remember why he spelled it differently than Sunday, maybe so the local ecclesiastics couldn't condemn him for taking the name of the Lord's Day in vain.

what me bored?

 I can walk and chew gum at the same time.  Likewise I can be yapping and think carefully and reflect at the same time.  Actually yapping is kind of my way of thinking and reflecting, like using pencil and paper to do arithmetic.  Many years ago I read a maxim that you don't really know anything well unless you write about it.  Thoughts drift in and out of your head, and that's all well and good but you need the concentration of writing to get a firm grip on what you are talking about.  Sometimes what seems to be a brilliant idea evaporates as you attempt to put it into words.  

And I don't see what is so bad about yapping to hear myself yap.  I paint to watch myself paint.  I am the first person to behold my latest masterpiece.  Besides telling a story or revealing a truth, choosing the words, assembling the sentences, watching the cadence, slipping between subjects and then repeating a theme (the flip flops and lawyer thing), all a good time, and hopefully amusing my readers, though apparently not this time.

Myself I find politics endlessly interesting, but I am not going into all the inside baseball on that because I know Old Dog will not be amused.  I might be able to get Beagles into it.  In the grand old days he and I would be snarling and at each others throats, banging those computer keys like a barrelhouse piano morning and evening, evening and morning.  Good times.  I miss those days.

I don't catch the connection between being a psych major and being bored.  I am not often bored, in fact I bore a lot of people by telling them that the only times I was bored was when I was working.  Oh I see here where I said that I found all the recent hoopla about octopi a little boring.  I meant the hoopla not the animal.  

Way back at Gage Park High I sat next to a girl who was a year older than me, and seemed maybe a little wiser than me, and one day the subject of boredom came up.  There was a saying going around at the time in those school spirit pep days of the fifties that a truly intelligent person is never bored, and I brought that up to impress this older woman.  But she was not impressed, she was sort of a proto beatnik, lots of things are boring she answered, would have blown smoke in my face if we were allowed to smoke in Spanish class.  

I was surprised to hear her say something against a commonly held truth at the time, you didn't often go against common wisdom in the fifties.  Everybody liked the same things, Ed Sullivan, to name one, bestselling books, smash hit movies, Life magazine, and they were all boring.

So I was bored as a teenager (but isn't that expected for a teenager?), and later bored when I was working, but other than that I am not often bored.  

Okay maybe a tad bit bored with the cooking instructions, but if the subject had been balloon animals I would have been wide-eyed the whole length of the discourse.

I don't sleep that well these days.  Often like today I go to bed at ten thirty and wake up full awake at two thirty, with nothing to do.  Thanks Old Dog for giving me something to do.  Feeling a little tired now and maybe I can get in a couple more hours before the newspaper arrives.

All Quiet on the Northern Front

A casual observer might infer that nobody gives a rat's ass about the Institute anymore but I beg to differ.  Seems to me that this is a time of careful thought and reflection, not a time for yapping just to hear yourself yap.

Could be wrong though, which hardly matters in my opinion.  Years ago I recall being scolded for being "wishy-washy" and not firm in my convictions.  Was this my imagination?  Anyhow, I'm still wishy-washy because this binary, yes or no, Left or Right, Red State/Blue State type of thinking is flat out stupid.  Any system that ignores nuance and unintended consequences is bound to fail, often throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Mr. Beagles mentioned the Bundy clan, a group that I haven't given much thought to.  Then I thought about Julian Assange and Ed Snowden, a couple of more folks that have passed through my memory and there are others.  With all of talk of "rule of law" there isn't much discussion of an apparent lack of consistency in enforcement.  Happens every day, at all levels of the legal system but I can't decide if a certain amount of corruption is required to keep the system stable.  Just some thoughts knocking about my noggin, nothing to see here.

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When Mr. Beagles ignored college and hit the road he was way ahead of the curve and maybe didn't know it.  My online meandering led me to this line, "Education is vital. College is dumb."  That brought me to this site which I think is a thoughtful read; check it out at your leisure: https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/college-is-an-education-in-bullshit

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Speaking of college I seem to recall that Uncle Ken studied psychology, or was a Psych Major, or something like that.  Am I close?  I ask because he mentions finding more than a few things being boring.  Boring?  In this day and age, with near infinite information and knowledge at your fingertips?  I sense a disturbing lack of imagination as a cause, easily resolved.  I think you need more toys to play with, simple as that.

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I don't know if Uncle Ken is still making cornbread with the Jiffy mix.  Although I prefer making stuff from scratch I've discovered a major downside: Ingredients get old and funky if you're not doing a lot of baking.  A week ago I saw the Jiffy mix on sale at a local independent grocery store, 2 boxes for one dollar, half its normal price, so why not?  Muffins are too fiddly to store so I opted for the square pan version and the results were okay, barely.  Flavor was good, nice cornmeal mouthfeel but too dry and crumbly for my liking.  Good enough, though, and suitable for freezing.  The next day I tried again, with some changes.  Replace the water with buttermilk, add an extra egg, and add about 3 tablespoons of melted butter.  Ladies and gentlemen we have a winner!  Cut into squares, wrap with cling film and freeze the ones you don't eat right away.  A little time in the microwave and you are good to go.  This variation should hold up very well with jalapenos or cheese and one box of mix will keep me snacking on cornbread for more than a week.  Good eating at the Geezer Chateau!