Posted 11:58 AM by Blah blah

A Woman's Tummy: The New Sexy Spot (Trends)

At Gender's Last Frontier (NY Times):

"Flipping through Us or People, a reader is left wondering whether Dame Judi Dench is the only living celebrity who has not been photographed with her navel proudly on view....

'The breast has become merely an accessory of the plastic body,' Ms. Bordo said. 'When everyone looks like Barbie, that kind of body can still remain an aesthetic ideal, but it almost ceases to have an erotic appeal.' [I disagree! -RG]...

Research done by Dr. [Devendra] Singh has shown that men deem women ideal when their waistlines represent 70 percent of their hip size. Many believe the narrower the waist in relation to the hips, the curvier — and presumably more appealing — the body in question.

In a sense, the renewed interest in the stomach, a body part exclusive to neither sex, perfectly serves two cultural imperatives: one that demands a kind of androgyny among women (acquire rippled tummy, wear low-riding jeans, look like a male underwear model or hip-hop star), and the other requiring them to prize child rearing....

With the exposed bellybutton now a public signal of a woman's interest in yoga, sex, motherhood, looking like J.Lo or all of the above, it is not surprising that a micro-industry has emerged to create various adornments for it."

Posted 11:33 AM by Blah blah

Lying About Why We Went to War (War)

Is lying about the reason for a war an impeachable offense? (CNN).

Have you been following the news? Bush is in trouble, man. I hope he gets fried for lying about the reasons we went to war with Iraq and for distorting intelligence about the supposed "weapons of mass destruction" that they still have not found. I hope this becomes a scandal on the order of Watergate or the Iran-Contra affair. Blair in the UK is also undergoing a backlash.

Posted 9:15 AM by Blah blah

I like Blogger's new editing window setup!

Habitat for Humanity (Housing, Community Service)

I joined Habitat for Humanity this week, to pursue my recent interest in home building and repair. See this quick tour of what they do. They build houses (from scratch) all over the world for low-income people. And they TEACH total beginners too! Former President Jimmy Carter and his wife joined Habitat after they left the White House, helping to make it more famous.

Through my Silicon Valley chapter, I helped work on a three-bedroom, two-story house in Los Gatos this week. I helped build a frame for a wall in a bathroom and installed it, nailed sheet rock to the side of the house, helped them remove a beam from the roof's frame that had been placed incorrectly, helped measure a window, and helped saw sheet rock to surround the future window. I also taught this couple to use a circular saw and miter saw!

I felt a great sense of accomplishment. :D They've been building this home since March. Now mainly just the wooden frame and floors are done. They started installing plumbing and piping yesterday. After they put on the roof, they will tackle the electrical wiring. After the home is built, they will also paint it, do the landscaping, the driveway, the backyard, and even plant flowers.

This is a fantastic group of folks! For example, I met a couple, Don and Barbara. Don is retired after working for IBM many years. He told me he then went into home building as a second career. He was an employee for Habitat and has worked in Mexico, in Jordan, in Africa, etc. building homes with them!

The Kelete family will soon be owning this new house on 25 Charles St. I met the mom and her two kids, and she even took a picture of me. They are originally from Eritrea (Africa). I had a lot of classmates at Berkeley from Eritrea, which has been racked by civil war for years.

Please read this essay I wrote about viewing work as a craft. It tells why I'm interested in practical stuff like home repair now. Most of us sit in our anonymous little cubicles, reading information and spitting out information. Nothing physical or concrete. Our work doesn't feel like it lasts, that it helps people, that it counts. We need to do stuff like this as an antidote.

Posted 8:51 AM by Blah blah

Shark Lab: Eric Goes to the Bahamas (Photos, Sharks)

Eric is away at the Bimini Biological Field Station (aka Shark Lab), the Bahamas! Next time I meet him, I'm gonna check for shark bites. He's there as their official shark photographer. "I am here with an international team of 22 (6 staff members and 18 volunteers, from the United States, Canada, Italy, Germany, England and Scotland) working with reknowned shark scientist Dr. Samuel H. Gruber, collecting data and tagging the local cohort of juvenile lemon sharks. The grueling schedule involves nightly gill netting and tagging from sunset to sunrise."

He's keeping this online journal of the shark expedition. See his gorgeous photos as usual!

See more of Eric's gorgeous photos of his fantastic world travels to other countries!

Posted 8:13 AM by Blah blah

Recipe for a Romance Novel. Abusive Relationships and the Cycle of Violence. (Relationships)

From Mira:

"The Narrative Logic of the Romance

1. The heroine’s social identity is thrown into question.
2. The heroine reacts antagonistically to an aristocrat male.
3. The aristocrat male responds ambiguously to the heroine.
4. The heroine interprets the behaviour as evidence of a purely sexual interest in her.
5. The heroine responds to the hero’s behaviour with anger or coldness.
6. The hero retaliates by punishing the heroine.
7. The heroine and hero are physically and/or emotionally separated.
8. The hero treats the heroine tenderly.
9. The heroine responds warmly to the hero’s acts of tenderness.
10. The heroine reinterprets the hero’s ambiguous behaviour as the product of previous hurt.
11. The hero proposes to/openly declares his love for/demonstrates his unwavering commitment to the heroine with a supreme act of tenderness.
12. The heroine responds sexually and emotionally to the hero.
13. The heroine’s identity is restored.

Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature.

Like, I’ve always been stuck at no. 4 yo. O.k. I exaggerate. Twice, I made it to 12, then lost a turn, stepped back 8 spaces and landed at no. 4 again."

This sounds just like the plot of Pride and Prejudice. In other words, why acting warm, then cold, then warm to women will get you some chicks. Or acting like a prick, then like a recovering prick, gains you the sympathy of certain women who want to nurse and reform you. Some women seek this drama and lap it up. If a "nice guy" is too straightforwardly nice to her, with no edge, no hint of menace, and no danger of separation, she gets bored.

One of my friends, a very independent and capable woman in her 30s, has been down this road with her big jerk boyfriend. I told her she's infected big time with the "Florence Nightingale" complex---wanting to be the savior of "bad boys." She was really surprised. (See Women – Why do they put up with abuse?)

This pattern works in novels and movies, but in real life, I find it unhealthy. If you look at abusive relationships, you find many unglamourous similarities to Mira's list. Please read this carefully if you think you may be in an abusive relationship, or if you feel you have a personality that invites abuse:

- Warning Signs of Abusive Relationships
- About Abusive Relationships
- Healthy Vs. Abusive: What's the Difference?
- Effects of Abuse

Last year I volunteered at HomeSafe, helping take care of the children of battered women. I was one of a few men volunteering. This is a group of apartments next to Santa Clara University, made to temporarily house women and their kids after the women have run away from their abusive husbands or boyfriends. (By the way, MEN can be victims of abuse too. San Francisco holds one of the few centers in the U.S. that houses abused men.) We had to take 19 hours of training before we could volunteer, studying things like the infamous "Cycle of Violence."

The Cycle of Violence and Abuse:

1. THE TENSION-BUILDING PERIOD: This is usually the longest period of the cycle.

THE ABUSER MAY:

- be moody, sullen, faultfinding and very critical.
- withdraw affection
- isolate partner
- belittle partner
- drink and/or take drugs
- make threats
- destroy partner's personal property
- engage in inconsistent and "crazy-making" behavior

THE VICTIM MAY:

- attempt to keep partner calm and placate partner
- become overly accommodating, agreeable, solicitous and nurturing
- become silent, or overly-talkative
- withdraw from, and avoid, family and friends
- try to keep the kids quiet and "out of the way"
- constantly feel as if she is "walking on eggshells"

2. VIOLENT OR ABUSIVE INCIDENT: This is usually the briefest period of the cycle.

THE ABUSER MAY:

- beat partner, often severely
- rape partner
- attack partner with weapon
- isolate partner from family and friends
- imprison partner
- become extremely verbally abusive
- humiliate and degrade partner, often publicly

THE VICTIM MAY:

- protect herself any way she can
- attempt to calm abuser down
- try to reason with abuser
- call the police
- fight back
- leave, or attempt to leave

3. RESPITE PERIOD: (i.e. the "Promises and Presents" Period) In many abusive relationships there may not be any respite period at all.

THE ABUSER MAY:

- apologize, cry, and beg for forgiveness
- make declarations of love and want
- promise to get help, to go for counseling to AA, to do "whatever it takes"
- send flowers and presents
- take partner out lavishly
- enlist support from family, friends, clergy and the children
- promise it will never happen again

THE VICTIM MAY:

- agree to stay, return, or take abuser back
- cancel, or try to cancel, legal proceedings
- make appointments with counselor or therapist for abuser and self
- cancel those appointments because things seem to be better
- feel happy and hopeful
- believe it will never happen again

The whole cycle then REPEATS.

Also see Why Women Stay in Abusive Relationships.

During my training to deal with battered women, one woman came and gave a painful speech on her several years of abusive marriage, why she left her abusive husband, and why it took her so long to leave. She said she never discussed any of her problems with family or friends, out of shame. Outside their home, she and her husband acted like the model couple. She was a stay-at-home mom and didn't have many friends. He usually discouraged her attempts to find new friends. They had two kids in elementary school.

She finally came to the breaking point this way: one weekend she left to stay in San Francisco with some friends. She had some young kittens she cared for very much. Her husband had just gotten this big, ferocious-looking dog which she didn't like. She asked him repeatedly to make sure the cats were kept in a safe place and that he'd watch them. When she got back home the following Monday, the kittens were gone. She looked frantically around the house and the backyard. Nothing.

Finally she heard some noise in the garage. Peeking in, she saw her husband's new dog. Clenched in his jaws was one of the young kittens. Her husband had just thrown the kittens in the garage the whole weekend, with the dog!

She freaked. She could see something similar happening to her children that way, and she decided to never accept abuse and neglect again. When she had been abused, she had tried to "take it" silently, hoping things would get better. But when it came to her kids and her pets---that was the end. Several years later she married a new man, gentle and kind. She is now very happy and makes speeches to young women, praying they will avoid her fate.

The first time I visited San Diego, I met this woman who acted strangely and invited me into her motel room. It turns out she had been abused and was running away from her husband. Read the whole story here.

Please, ladies, do NOT make a common mistake for teenaged girls and interpret possessive, controlling behavior as "romantic" or a "sign of love." It's SELFISH. The ugly truth of Mira's list above is it may be a sign of potential abuse and repeated disappointments for you. It's possible to find a man both emotionally stable and romantic and exciting. I guarantee that.

Posted 12:59 PM by Blah blah

Why Pixar Makes Such Quality Movies (Entertainment)

How Pixar stays in 'toon': 'Finding Nemo' director underscores animation studio's reliance on fostering new talent (San Francisco Chronicle).

Posted 12:48 PM by Blah blah

Teen Girls Teach FBI to Pretend to be Teen Girls on the Internet (Crime)

This story is hilarious.

Girls Teach Teen Cyber Gab to FBI Agents: Maryland Students Help Catch Pedophiles On the Internet (Washington Post):
_______________
For those investigative details, the FBI calls on Karen, Mary and Kristin -- Howard County eighth-graders and best friends.

During the past year, the three have been teaching agents across the country how to communicate just like teenage girls, complete with written quizzes on celebrity gossip and clothing trends and assigned reading in Teen People and YM magazines. The first time the girls gave a quiz, all the agents failed.

"They, like, don't know anything," said Mary, 14, giggling....

One agent kept insisting that he was right when he answered on a quiz that Justin Timberlake was more popular than Destiny's Child. Another was miffed when the girls told the class that Led Zeppelin was just not cool. Some kept wondering why "l2m" in instant messaging couldn't be "love to meet," instead of "listen to music."

And the younger female FBI agents assumed that teenage girls would think actor George Clooney is cute.

"We're, like, no," said Mary, making a face.

"He's, like, 50," Karen exclaimed....

Thanks to the girls, Bald said, the FBI has gathered such valuable information as: never begin a chat with "hello"; never use proper grammar in instant messages; and "pos" stands for "parent over shoulder."

After the ceremony, several parents talked excitedly about finally finding out what "pos" meant.

Karen shot Mary a worried look: "Our classmates are going to kill us."

Posted 10:46 AM by Blah blah

Weird Dream (Revealing)

Just had a strange dream last night about an ex-girlfriend of mine. It was bittersweet and a kind of wish fulfillment for me. Sigh. I dreamed that I met her, travelling in this strange group of people, long after we had stopped seeing each other. She was suffering, unhappy, and didn't belong. I dreamed that we still had some spark and unresolved feelings for each other. That I was her rescuer.

Double sigh. I left that relationship in strange circumstances. I tried to maintain the friendship afterwards, but it failed. Just too weird and bittersweet.

Posted 2:51 PM by Blah blah

Babies Learn to Talk Like Birds Learn to Sing (Psychology)

Research shows similarities between infants learning to talk, birds learning to sing (Indiana University):

How infants respond to their mother's touches and smiles influences their development in a manner much like what young birds experience when learning to sing, according to a research project involving the Department of Psychology at Indiana University Bloomington and the Biological Foundations of Behavior program at Franklin and Marshall College.

An article on the research, titled "Social interaction shapes babbling: Testing parallels between birdsong and speech," will be published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The Web site for the journal is http://www.pnas.org/misc/highlights.shtml.

"The main point of our research is how the reaction of the babies to their mother's touches and smiles changes how they talk, and this corresponds to what birds do when learning to sing," said Meredith West, a professor of psychology and biology at IU. She collaborated on the article with Andrew King, a senior scientist at IU, and Michael Goldstein, an assistant professor of psychology at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa.

Posted 8:53 AM by Blah blah

Breakup

Well my sincere friend Mira is finally breaking up with her boyfriend. It's about time, sweetie. Good for you! *Hugs* Every time she and I talk, I marvel at her progression from before till now. All my best and we'll talk again.

Now is a good time to read Breakup Girl.

Posted 4:50 AM by Blah blah

Salam Pax Worked For Me (War)

More on Salam Pax, the blogger from Baghdad who is a 29-year-old architect. Salam shares one thing with me---we both love The New Yorker magazine, which I consider to have some of the best writing in America.

Salam Pax Is Real: How do I know Baghdad's famous blogger exists? He worked for me (Slate):

"His latest post mentioned an afternoon he spent at the Hamra Hotel pool, reading a borrowed copy of The New Yorker. I laughed out loud. He then mentioned an escapade in which he helped deliver 24 pizzas to American soldiers. I howled. Salam Pax, the most famous and most mysterious blogger in the world, was my interpreter. The New Yorker he had been reading—mine. Poolside at the Hamra—with me. The 24 pizzas—we had taken them to a unit of 82nd Airborne soldiers I was writing about."

Posted 10:22 AM by Blah blah

Tape Lets You Walk Up Walls Like Spider-Man (Science)

Wow! With help from a gecko, scientists invent tape that lets you walk up walls like Spiderman (The Independent):

"The tape mimics the natural adhesive used by gecko lizards to walk upside down on a ceiling, and tests have shown that it is sticky enough to support someone who wants to change a light bulb without using stepladders.

An Anglo-Russian team of researchers took two years to develop the tape after studying the secret of the climbing abilities of the gecko...The soles of the gecko's feet are coated with millions of microscopic hairs. Each creates tiny forces of molecular attraction when in contact with a solid surface.

When all the hairs of its feet make contact, the combined adhesive force is stronger than many man-made glues, with the added benefit that its feet can be peeled away from the surface at any time to allow it to move one leg at a time. Professor Andre Geim, director of Manchester University's Centre for Mesoscience and Nanotechnology, used the principle to make reusable adhesive tape in collaboration with the Institute for Microelectronics Technology in Chemogolovka, Russia.

A 2mm-square segment of the tape was strong enough in one test to support a Spiderman toy - 15cm high and weighing 40g - by one hand from a glass ceiling. This means that covering the two palms of a man with the tape would enable his full weight to be supported, the scientists report in the journal Nature Materials."

By the way, when will people ever get the spelling of "Spider-Man" right? It's NOT spelled "Spiderman." As a huge Spidey fan since childhood, I should know.

Posted 9:46 AM by Blah blah

Top High Schools in America (Education)

The 100 Best High Schools in America (Newsweek). Here are their rankings.

The closest school to me is Gunn High School (#50) in Palo Alto. It's right next to Stanford University, about 25 miles away from me. Palo Alto High (#199, a.k.a. "Paly") and Gunn High are the tops.

A girl on my reading list, Paz, goes to Palo Alto High. She actually reads and likes my political entries!

Next is Monta Vista High (#82) in Cupertino. Lots of rich kids there. I went to Cupertino High (unranked) myself. Our best departments were English (I took every advanced class we had), German, and math (before my favorite teacher Mr. Jim Symons left for DeAnza College).

Then comes Lynbrook High (#85) in San Jose. My parents live just near it, and my brother went there.

Then Mission San Jose High (#122) in Fremont and Saratoga High (#143) in Saratoga---where my cousins went.

Note that all of the schools I just listed are PUBLIC schools. Free. The price of admission depends on where you buy a house. We have some very smart people around here---parents with VERY high expectations of their kids.

It's strange they left out two private Catholic prep schools in San Jose, which I also think are tops: Bellarmine College Preparatory (all-boys) and Presentation High (all-girls). In high school, I competed for four years in Speech and Debate, and Bellarmine had one of the best high school debating teams in California. Santa Clara University, a private Catholic school, gives scholarships to a few high school students each year to take any college math classes they like there. I got scholarships for two years of math there when I was 16. Two of my classmates were girls from Presentation High. One later went to Caltech and the other to Stanford.

Posted 8:45 AM by Blah blah

Elen's Back (Blog)

Hi Elen! Long time no see. She's back to blogging and I've added her to my link list. She's a 29-year-old Filipina who used to be an editorial assistant for the Philippine Daily Inquirer. She still contributes articles. She left it behind for love, marrying a European guy and now living in Vienna, Austria.

Her profile. Her husband.

Posted 7:59 AM by Blah blah

Ken's Site Back Up (Suicide)

Ken's site was temporarily down. It's back up again.

I talked to him for a long time last night, and he's feeling better. However, he's still at risk. He still needs our support.

Ken was happy I was supporting him. Luckily he has the support of several people around him. He's also been working hard and doing intensive physical exercise.

I am being deliberately vague about what we talked about. You should know by now that I am VERY careful here about violating the privacy of people who talk to me, and I only wrote stuff that Ken had mainly written on his own site already.

Posted 6:44 PM by Blah blah

Salam Pax Revealed (War)

Remember Salam Pax, that mysterious blogger in Baghdad who had the world reading his gripping first-hand stories of life during the war?

Well that British paper The Guardian finally tracked him down! Starting next week, Salam Pax will be writing every two weeks in The Guardian! During the war, The Guardian was my FAVORITE news source, comprehensive, independent-minded, and endlessly fascinating. If you haven't checked it out or seen all of its superbly done side sections, you're missing out!

Read the essay Cowboy Kahlil wrote about Salam. Lots of juicy quotes.

Salam's Story (The Guardian):
___________________
Salam is shy, but he has a quick and sometimes cynical humour that flows easily through his writing. Yet occasionally his wit choked on the images of death and war that appeared on the family television screen, beamed into the Hotel Pax from an illegal satellite dish on the roof. "On BBC we are watching scenes of Iraqis surrendering," he wrote on March 21, in the first week of combat. "My youngest cousin was muttering, 'What shame' to himself. Yes, it is better for them to do that, but still, seeing them carrying that white flag makes something deep inside you cringe."

By now his weblog had blossomed in confidence from idle chat to startling reportage that seems to have been driven by an underlying urge to resist the regime and to document its fall. He is almost offended when I ask later why he risked staying in Baghdad during the war, rather than escaping abroad which, as a well-off, educated Iraqi, would not have been hard. "I absolutely had to stay. This is your country, this is your place. I had to see what was going to happen."

Yet in the final weeks before the impending conflict, he became increasingly anxious that the men of the Mukhabarat, the feared Iraqi intelligence agency, were on to him. "They were not only paranoid, they were going crazy," he says. At one point the regime blocked access to the website on which he was posting his writing, blogspot.com. "There was the possibility that they knew. I spent a couple of days thinking this is the end. And then you wait for a couple of days and nothing happens and you say, 'OK, let's do it again.' Stupid risks, one after another."

Posted 3:59 PM by Blah blah

Bloggers vs. Journalists (Journalism)

This is an old debate, but I so agree with Naughton's ideas.

If you really want to know, ask a blogger (The Observer)
by Prof. John Naughton:

"Geoffrey Nunberg fulminated in the New York Times about the fact that whenever one does a Google search on any topical issue, the top page rankings often go to blogs rather than established media sources....

This was, according to Nunberg, A Bad Thing. After all, most bloggers are not professional journalists, but rank amateurs!...[T]he mindset he represents is widespread in Big Media, so it is worth devoting a few moments to unpacking the prejudices behind it.

First, there is the contempt for 'amateur' writers, endemic in professional journalism. Hacks are always astonished by anyone who writes for no pay, so upwards of half a million such amateurs now publishing blogs leaves the pros speechless. It also leads them to deride blogs as an epidemic of vanity publishing rather than the glorious outbreak of free expression it actually represents.

Second is the assumption that anything written by an amateur is, by definition, worthless. Yet journalism has always been, as Northcliffe observed, 'the art of explaining to others that which one does not oneself understand.'

In fact, when it comes to many topics in which I have a professional interest, I would sooner pay attention to particular blogs than to anything published in Big Media - including the venerable New York Times. This is not necessarily because journalists are idiots; it's just that serious subjects are complicated and hacks have neither the training nor the time to reach a sophisticated understanding of them - which is why much journalistic coverage is inevitably superficial and often misleading, and why so many blogs are thoughtful and accurate by comparison.

Third, there is the problem - not often touched upon in the New York Times, by the way - that many controversial public issues are ignored by Big Media for the simple reason that the ideological and commercial interests of their proprietors preclude it."

Posted 6:52 AM by Blah blah

Please Support Ken! (Suicide)

Remember I wrote on May 16 about my experiences with suicidal people on the Net?

Well I've been talking to this cool guy Ken recently. He'd contacted me with questions about my cgiComments tutorial. It turns out that Ken, an 18-year-old college student, is very precocious, smart, and talented. A good computer hacker, a romantic, and a perceptive and sensitive fellow. I keep telling him he could go far.

On May 18, one of Ken's dear lifelong friends, Ben Jordan, took his own life. (Photo of Ben.)

Ken has been suffering tremendously the last few weeks and is having a hugely difficult time recovering from Ben's suicide. He is depressed and not behaving normally. I've urged him to go see a doctor.

Would you please help me show Ken your support? His birthday is coming up in two days, too. You may fill out that email form on his website. Please let Ken know he is important to many people and we care about him. Let's help him get through this!

Thanks, everyone.

Posted 4:52 AM by Blah blah

You Laugh More When You Care (Humor)

You can tell my life is so exciting when I wake up at 4:30 am, and my first impulse is to blog. This blog is like a hungry baby that keeps crying "WAAAAH!" I just hope when I grow old and senile, Blog, that you will remember all the thankless hours I wasted on you. I hope you will remember your daddy Raymond in his old age and make sure to wipe the apple sauce off of his chin when you're done feeding him. And please change his diaper.

Why do I love that TV show Frasier? Many reasons.

A main reason is it's not a stupid gag-fest. Many times Frasier is exposing his heart to someone or admitting what a jackass he just was, and I really feel a poignancy, a bittersweet connection with the character. The show has such warm, touching characters and serious moments amidst the humor that it's as much drama as comedy. I feel like I've stumbled onto a PBS play and keep wondering when they're gonna cut to a pledge break. I love how the humor is driven by character, not contrived one-liners.

One summer as a teenager, I worked as a counselor at a camp for disabled people. It's one of the best jobs I've ever had, emotionally. We took care of autistic folks, blind folks, epileptics, Down's Syndrome kids, sweet angels and spoiled brats---you name it. One fellow counselor was this 30-year-old British guy named Colin Ferguson, with slightly balding brown hair and a wry expression. He looked like an "adult" in our group of teenagers, yet he was the biggest CLOWN of our group! Like someone out of that British sci-fi comedy Red Dwarf. The very first time I met him, we'd all gathered in the cafeteria to get acquainted.

Our leader Debbie said, "It's Colin's birthday!" Suddenly Colin leapt from his seat and jumped on a table. Two guys jumped up and started chasing him furiously around the room. Colin ducked under tables next to our feet, spilled chairs over, and made a hell of a racket trying to escape. Eventually the guys caught him, lifted him from both ends, and carried him out of the cafeteria. New folks like me were shocked, our jaws hanging. I'd thought the disabled kids were the "patients," but now I wondered if the lunatics were running the asylum!

What a way to break the ice. Of course it was all a joke. The camp had this tradition that whomever had a birthday that day had to be chased and carried out of the room.

So we all loved Colin. He was a man-boy who could act like a silly goof when the mood was too serious. And he did it for the disabled folks and for us. He really loved them. He loved this job. He burned with devotion to his campers. Every little thing an autistic kid might struggle to get right, Colin was there as head cheerleader, head personal goofball.

One time we had a talent show. All the campers had to get up and show off something. One guy tried to "play" the piano, and he ending up going "poink poink poink...pink!" randomly bonking the keys. I think I acted in a silly skit. I dressed as a woman or something, with blue lipstick. Colin had been whooping it up for every camper who performed, cheering in the front row and slamming his hand on the table in applause. Then we had a break. They showed a video of that classic 1950s TV comedy I Love Lucy. It was one of my favorite episodes, "Job Switching," in which Lucy and her best friend Ethel take a job at a candy factory to raise money. (You can watch that little scene here on the Net.) The funniest scene is where Lucy and Ethel are at the candy conveyer belt, ready to package the candy. At first they grab the candy fine and do a good job. Then the belt starts moving faster and faster, and they end up having to stuff the chocolates in their mouths, their hats, and in their chests.

I noticed Colin did not laugh at ALL during this scene. He kinda stared at the TV, exhausted. But no laugh at a classic moment from a classic comedy.

Then the campers got up and starting showing their "talent" again. One boy did some aerobics. One girl got up and sang really off-key. Suddenly, Colin was jolted erect, whistling with pinkies in the corners of his mouth, clapping his hands raw, bellowing "YAAAAAAYYYYY!" at every camper. For each act, he laughed heartily and found it the funniest thing in the world.

I remember thinking, "Hah! It's weird he had zippo reaction to Lucille Ball, but when Becky sings off-key, he loves it!" Then I realized something. That most of the time when we laugh, it's not because someone just told us a great joke. It's mostly because we care about someone, we really like him, and he does something that reveals himself as he typically is. His words, put coldly on a page, may feel flat to someone who doesn't know him. Yet because he's our loveable buddy or crazy Uncle Don, we can't HELP but laugh. We laugh to show support, to show we care about someone. It's communication. It's cheerleading.

Colin showed me the perfect example of that on that day. Which is why character-driven humor, as in Frasier, is the most effective humor. It's because the character brands himself so strongly on your heart and reveals something so true about the world, that you love him, and you laugh.

Last year, researchers from the U. of Hertfordshire in England did a study called LaughLab to find the "world's funniest joke." They read and helped rate over 40,000 jokes. These professors must be utter bores because their winning joke barely makes me crack a grin.

The whole idea of somehow logically narrowing out the "funniest" joke is dumb. Humor based on characters we love and situations to which we relate is much funnier than any one-liner a Vegas comic can write.

We must care before we laugh.