Quality of life

Much is written about this and it’s probably the most important factor about living. I am a lucky retiree. I am 73 years old and I enjoy a high level of physical and mental well being. My wife who is 28 years younger than I continues to tell me that I look and act much younger than my biological age. A lot of that has to do with where I was brought up and have lived. Here’s what I look like in a photo taken about a month ago:

I look pretty healthy and lively even at 7AM leaving China earlier this month. This morning I saw the image of a man in Peru looking much the worse for the wear and tear of his life.

Photo by Tomas Munita for NY Times

This is Jesus Guitan, 60, who worked for 17 years at a base metals smelter in Peru. He now suffers from several health problems, which he attributes to the pollution he was exposed to during his working years. It’s this image that got me thinking about the depth and breadth of my well being in comparison with so many less fortunate than I.

And then there is the image of this man in China who clearly has to work very hard for meager wages:

Three men, three different living conditions and three quite different images of well being! I am quite happy with mine, thank you very much!

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To answer why psychology became the subject he wanted most to study …

Steven Pinker has written this in NY Times Sunday Magazine:

The very fact that I had to think so hard brought home what scholars of autobiography and memoir have long recognized. None of us know what made us what we are, and when we have to say something, we make up a good story.

Image via Wikipedia

An obvious candidate for the real answer is that we are shaped by our genes in ways that none of us can directly know. Of course genes can’t pull the levers of our behavior directly. But they affect the wiring and workings of the brain, and the brain is the seat of our drives, temperaments and patterns of thought. Each of us is dealt a unique hand of tastes and aptitudes, like curiosity, ambition, empathy, a thirst for novelty or for security, a comfort level with the social or the mechanical or the abstract. Some opportunities we come across click with our constitutions and set us along a path in life.

Given the story of where I was born, Barcelona, Spain, and of how I got to live in Canada – my parents were born on Ile Madame next to Cape Breton Island – beginning in mid-July 1940, I have been messing around with the notion of writing the story of my “path in life” to this point.

I am 73some now and in 4 days I fly off to live and work in China, Dalian in Liaoning Province next to the Yellow Sea. So my “path in life” is going to take on a whole new orientation. And there is no doubt that I will blog post about the quirks and turns of that “path in life”.

Image via Wikipedia

So writing that memoir, whether it will be semi-fictional and how semi-, takes on a new life.

But it occurs to me that not the least important fact today is that I feel that I have reached a milestone as an “aspiring writer“. In the last week I have wakened, with the help of a continuing conversation about why I write, to the sense that I am now a learning writer and I won’t refer to being an “aspiring writer” any more.

I feel in my gut that that means I have given myself permission to write that memoir in a more deliberate way than I have been doing since I began messing around with it about 12 years ago.

Now I accept that I have to write my way into a way of telling that memoir story in way that compels my interest to write it and then get a sense of it’s value to me most of all, once I have finished the writing of it. If I can do that then I will have a better chance that my completed memoir will have some redeeming interest to my own children and grandchildren, who are the primary audience I am aiming at.

“The will to believe is strong in all realms”

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

From the NY Times commenting on the latest Oprah “will to believe”:

In the book, he wrote not only that he reunited with his wife in New York years after she threw apples to him over the fence, but also that he had actually gone on a

“You’d think somebody would say, ‘Hmm, that’s amazing, let’s just spend an hour or a day seeing how plausible that is,’ ” said

Mr. Andersen compared Mr. Rosenblat to

“The will to believe something that is convenient to believe is strong in all realms,” he said.

I suppose that Oprah’s rep will end up slightly tattered for those who take the trouble to read serious journalism, but many people don’t bother to examine what they prefer to “believe” especially if “Oprah said it!”.

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Truly amazing images of foodscapes!

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The headline in Telegraph.co.uk reads:

Foodscapes: amazing food art by Carl Warner

He makes them, shoots them and sells ‘em!

Obama moves outside the “box” again

I do believe choosing such a large public setting to spend election night with so many people is a first in US politics, or politics anywhere in the world!

North Korea – a mind numbing image

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Whereas China uses lots of dancers, acrobats and such for Olympic openings, North Korea specializes in gigantic people involvement in ritual state leadership appreciation.

Big Picture has a series of images taken by one photographer that give an overall image of mind numbing life and leisure in that edgy totalitarian country.

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“Ho and the books” about publishing political literature via Danwei

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Quite a story about “Two countries, two systems” that outlines how some freedom to print is allowed in Hong Kong and gets back to China.

Quoted from the Danwei text:

Ho Pin (何频), founder of Mirror Books, one of the best-known political publishers. Ho talks about balancing commercial sensationalism with a desire to give authors an outlet for works that are unpublishable on the mainland.

I will email this piece to Lorne Gunter and John Kay, cheap shot columnists with the National Post.

More about La Leopolda’s sale and other expensive real estate

Image via Wikipedia

BBC News has this report

Here’s the last paragraph:

But even the latest record may not last long. Asia’s richest man, industrialist Mukesh Ambani is expected to move into the 27-storey property he has built to house his family and offices in Mumbai next year.

With a value reported to be up to $2bn, the design was said to have be inspired by the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

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Yes, this is in Shanghai

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_XIA8701

Originally uploaded by spiky247

This is an unusual image of “Communist” China.

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They say that elder political whores have little shame and …

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this week in a crass effort to hype sales of his own political memoir, it seems that that elder person of CanPolitics, B. Mulroney just can’t keep his Big Chin from wagging.

What else is he going to say? He will be wined and dined by his “employer”, his rich friends and hangers-on, so why does he feel the need to pee verbally over some of his former political opponents. It can’t be a special version of the Seven Year Itch, or can it?

I was despairing about the Front Page treatment that leader of CanMSM was giving his verbal affliction, until I read this editorial this morning:

Globe editorial
But will it sell books?
FROM FRIDAY’S GLOBE AND MAIL
SEPTEMBER 7, 2007 AT 7:14 AM EDT
Brian Mulroney has every right to question the often inflexible constitutional opinions of his long-time nemesis, Pierre Trudeau. But Mr. Mulroney has gone too far when he suggests that Mr. Trudeau, who died in 2000, was morally unfit for leadership because of mistakes of his youth. The personal attack is an unwarranted assault on a politician whose entire later career tacitly repudiated his earlier beliefs. It is unworthy of a former prime minister.

In an interview with CTV News this week to promote his upcoming memoirs, Mr. Mulroney was asked about Mr. Trudeau’s opposition to his government’s Meech Lake constitutional accord. It was an apt question, given Mr. Trudeau’s highly partisan and inflammatory objections to the accord and his significant role in its 1990 defeat. Instead of confining himself to the question, Mr. Mulroney savaged Mr. Trudeau’s reputation.

He evoked his opposition to the Allied cause during the Second World War, noting that so many other young men had enlisted to fight the Nazis. “Pierre Trudeau was not among them,” Mr. Mulroney continued. “That’s a decision he made. He’s entitled to make that kind of decision. But it doesn’t qualify him for any position of moral leadership in our society.” He added that Mr. Trudeau was “far from a perfect man.”

Recent intellectual histories of Mr. Trudeau depict a youth who was very far from perfect. As scholars Max and Monique Nemni chronicled in Young Trudeau: 1919-1944, Mr. Trudeau was then a captive of the nationalist cant prevalent among Roman Catholic intellectuals in Quebec during the 1930s. He espoused chauvinist francophone nationalism. There was a whiff of anti-Semitism. In 1942, he was a member of a secret organization that advocated revolution to establish an authoritarian regime. He was a creature of his very limited place and time.

Then he grew up, and atoned. In the 1950s, he defied insular Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis, defending the rights of workers and the need for a secular state. As prime minister, he denounced narrow ethnic nationalism. He fought for the inclusion of a Canadian Charter of Rights in the Constitution. He embraced and officially recognized multiculturalism. He defended bilingualism and biculturalism. He fostered the careers of Jewish Canadians. He defended the idea of a strong central government. It was an estimable, if controversial, life. And Mr. Mulroney has trashed it.

In many democracies, former political leaders practise a tradition of statesmanship. After a lifetime of bitter partisanship, they are permitted to rise above it, to treat former political enemies with respect. They may criticize each other’s ideas, but not their moral aptitude for office. Were he alive, Mr. Trudeau would have relished a constitutional debate. He would not have answered an intellectual challenge with the observation that his opponent was morally unfit for leadership. Mr. Mulroney has damaged only himself.

I guess I can say in all quietude, I couldn’t have said it better. For shame Big Jaw!