Home  >> Stories  >> The Tale Spinner #2016-30

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IN THIS ISSUE

• Leo Notenboom writes about the importance of balance
• John Bundy describes a real-life hero
• Bruce Galway asks a number of philosophical questions
• Carol Dilworth forwards an article about books
• Pat Moore suggests ways to get the most out of life
• Shirley Coutts and Zvonko Springer suggest interesting sites

Leo Notenboom, publisher of HeroicStories, writes

BOY, DO WE NEED GOOD NEWS…

I´ll be honest - it´s been a rough couple of weeks. It seems you can´t turn on the news or visit social media without getting bombarded with stories that make you despair for mankind.

Except it´s just not so.

I´m not saying that there aren´t bad, even horrific things happening - there are. And I don´t mean to minimize or downplay their importance whatsoever.

It´s just that all the bad news drowns out the good.

Here´s the good news: The majority of people are basically good. Still. The majority of people care for one another. The majority of people are decent human beings, not intent on disparaging or even killing one another.

The majority of people don´t make the news.

In fact it wouldn´t be "news" if they did.

I saw a comment on Facebook recently where someone was wishing for a some kind of "only good news" newspaper, or Facebook newsfeed, or something along those lines. The problem is that almost by definition, good people doing good things is so commonplace we don´t even think of it as news. Instead, the events we see publicised in the media as "news" are the out-of-the-ordinary, extreme, reaction-provoking, exceptional events of the day.

Again, it´s not that we shouldn´t be aware of, and even take action because of the bad news of the day. The problem is that when we feed ourselves a steady diet of only this type of negativity, it feeds on itself. We begin to believe that the world is bad, people are bad, and that there is no hope.

Is it any wonder that people become more polarized and more negative in face of this negative bombardment?

Look for balance. Look for the good. It´s out there. It´s here in HeroicStories, and it´s in daily life all around you if you just look for it. As Paul Harvey used to say, "Wash your ears out with this…."

Speaking of good news, consider this story by John Bundy of Malta:

THREE-WAY CONVERSATION

It was Saturday, 2 June 2001, a beautiful sunny day in Malta, and a day off my duties as a TV show host. Since my wife had things to do, I took my seven-year-old daughter by the sea for lunch.

On my arrival to the beach area I saw JoJo, a wealthy man in the hotel business. I´d met JoJo during a Malta charity ball in 1998, since then I hardly saw him twice. We sat down to chat in an open air cafe while I watched my daughter enjoy herself on the swings in front of us. Our conversation varied, from business to entertainment to the economy.

Suddenly our conversation was interrupted by a stranger politely asking permission to speak to me. Often people want to tell me something about my controversial TV show, when I am out on the streets.

He asked to speak to me privately, so we stood a bit away from my table. He said, "I´m James, 35 years old, father of a seven-year-old girl who´s very sick with leukemia. She needs treatment abroad. Doctors assure me that if treated in the UK, she has an 80 percent chance of survival. I don´t have the financial means to take her over. Can you please help."

Speechless, I stared in the man´s eyes that were filled with tears and asked how I could help. I took his particulars and went to sit back at the table. JoJo was having a phone conversation, but as soon as he finished he asked, "What´s wrong with you? Your face changed."

I told him. JoJo was sorry for this family and said I had the means through the media to help him. We headed off to our destinations. All weekend I thought about James, his daughter and his family. I even thought of doing a special TV show to raise funds for this sick child.

Monday morning I was at the office after I finished presenting my show, when my secretary said a man needed to speak to me. It was Mr. JoJo Vassallo.

JoJo walked into my office, which was surprising because JoJo is so busy with his hotel business I never imagined he had time to come and see me at the studio.

With chequebook in hand, he said, "Please, call the guy with the sick child and tell him that all expenses required by him, his wife, and his sick daughter to go to the UK for treatment will be covered by myself.

"John, I´ve been married for 35 years. I wasn´t lucky enough to have a child. I want to help this child now."

I picked up the phone to call James.

Rebecca is well and living a normal life, so James and Bridgette (her mum) are the happiest couple on earth. JoJo visits Rebecca. I´m so happy that there are so many good people on this earth, and to have been privileged to be a part of this.

ED. NOTE: To comment on this story, or to get your own free subscription to HeroicStories, click on HeroicStories.org

Bruce Galway suggests that you ponder these questions when you don´t want to think about important stuff:

PHILOSOPHICAL QUESTIONS

If you choke a Smurf, what color does it turn?

Is it OK to use the AM radio after noon?

What do chickens think we taste like?

What do people in China call their good plates?

What do you call a male ladybug?

What hair colour do they put on the driver´s license of a bald man?

When dog food is new and improved tasting, who tests it?

Why didn´t Noah swat those two mosquitoes?

Why do they sterilize the needle for lethal injections?

Why doesn´t glue stick to the inside of the bottle?

Why is it called tourist season if we can´t shoot at them?

Why do you need a driver´s license to buy liquor when you can´t drink and drive?

Why isn´t phonetic spelled the way it sounds?

Why are there flotation devices in the seats of planes instead of parachutes?

Why are cigarettes sold at gas stations where smoking is prohibited?

Have you ever imagined a world without hypothetical situations?

How does the guy who drives the snowplow get to work?

If the 7-11 is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, why does it have locks on the door?

Why is a bra singular and panties plural?

You know that indestructible black box that is used on airplanes? Why don´t they make the whole plane out of that stuff?

If a firefighter fights fire and a crime fighter fights crime, what does a freedom fighter fight?

If they squeeze olives to get olive oil, how do they get baby oil?

If a cow laughs, does milk come out of her nose?

If you are driving at the speed of light and you turn your headlights on, what happens?

Why do they put Braille dots on the keypad of a drive-up ATM?

Why is it that when you transport something by car it is called shipment, but when you transport something by ship, it´s called cargo?

Why don´t sheep shrink when it rains?

What would Geronimo say if he jumped out of an airplane?

Why are they called apartments when they are all stuck together?

If flying is so safe, why do they call the airport the terminal?

If you throw a cat out of the house, does it become kitty litter?

If aspirins are always "Take two," why not increase the size of ONE?

Carol Dilworth forwards this essay by Christine Smallwood:

GHOSTS IN THE STACKS

In the nineteen-nineties, when you bought a book at Barnes & Noble, the cashier slipped it into a plastic bag bearing a black-and-white illustration of an author´s face - Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Edith Wharton. Recently, I was poking around a bookstore in Manhattan and noticed a canvas tote for sale. In a simple red heart, the word "books" was spelled out in white letters. This tale of two bags is the story of decades of change in the publishing industry. "Books," O.K. - but which ones?

The number of Americans who read books has been declining for thirty years, and those who do read have become proud of, even a bit overidentified with, the enterprise. Alongside the tote bags you can find T-shirts, magnets, and buttons emblazoned with covers of classic novels; the website Etsy sells tights printed with poems by Emily Dickinson. A spread in The Paris Review featured literature-inspired paint-chip colors (a charcoal Funeral Suit for "The Loser"; a mossy "Graham Greene".)

The merchandising of reading has a curiously undifferentiated flavor, as if what you read mattered less than that you read. In this climate of embattled bibliophilia, a new subgenre of books about books has emerged, a mix of literary criticism, autobiography, self-help, and immersion journalism: authors undertake reading stunts to prove that reading - anything - still matters.

"I thought of my adventure as Off-Road or Extreme Reading," Phyllis Rose writes in "The Shelf: From LEQ to LES," the latest stunt book, in which she reads through a more or less random shelf of library books. She compares her voyage to Ernest Shackleton´s explorations in the Antarctic. "However, I like to sleep under a quilt with my head on a goose down pillow," she writes. "So I would read my way into the unknown - into the pathless wastes, into thin air, with no reviews, no best-seller lists, no college curricula, no National Book Awards or Pulitzer Prizes, no ads, no publicity, not even word of mouth to guide me."

She is not the first writer to set off on an armchair expedition. A. J. Jacobs, a self-described "human guinea pig," spent a year reading the encyclopedia for "The Know-It-All: One Man´s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World" (2004). Ammon Shea read all of the Oxford English Dictionary for his book "Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages" (2008). In "The Whole Five Feet" (2010), Christopher Beha made his way through the Harvard Classics during a year in which he suffered serious illness and had a death in the family. In "Howard´s End Is on the Landing" (2010), Susan Hill limited herself to reading only the books that she already owned. Such "extreme reading" requires special personal traits: grit, stamina, a penchant for self-improvement, and a dash of perversity.

Rose fits the bill. A retired English professor, she is the author of popular biographies of Virginia Woolf and Josephine Baker, as well as "The Year of Reading Proust" (1997), a memoir of her family life and the manners and mores of the Key West literary scene. Her best book is "Parallel Lives" (1983), a group biography of five Victorian marriages. (It is filled with marvellous details and set pieces, like the one in which John Ruskin, reared on hairless sculptures of female nudes, defers consummating his marriage to Effie Gray for so long that she sues for divorce.)

Rose is consistently generous, knowledgeable, and chatty, with a knack for connecting specific incidents to large social trends. Unlike many biblio-memoirists, she loves network television and is refreshingly un-nostalgic about print; in "The Shelf" she says that she prefers her e-reader to certain moldy paperbacks.

She is clear-eyed about what awaits her on LEQ - LES. "I had no reason to believe that the books would be worth the time I would spend on them," she writes. "They could be dull, even lethally so." She stops short of claiming that the whole of a mediocrity is worth more than the sum of its parts; it is the uniqueness of her whole that excites. "I was certain, however, that no one in the history of the world had read exactly this series of novels."

Rose´s paean to arbitrariness is telling. She brings an element of chaos to a reading culture that is otherwise corralled by algorithms. She could read this shelf or that shelf or that other shelf over there. For her, arbitrariness doesn´t mean that her experience is interchangeable. It is, on the contrary, irreplaceable.

The way most of us choose our reading today is simple. Someone posts a link, and we click on it. We set out to buy one book, and Amazon suggests that we might like another. Friends and retailers know our preferences, and urge recommendations on us. The bookstore and the library are curated, too - the people who work there may even know you and track your habits - but they are organized in an impersonal way.

Shelves and open stacks offer not only immediate access to books but strange juxtapositions. Arbitrary classification breeds surprises - Nikolai Gogol next to William Golding, Clarice Lispector next to Penelope Lively. The alphabet has no rationale, agenda, or preference.

Rose first gets the idea for "The Shelf" while browsing the stacks of the New York Society Library, on the Upper East Side. Founded in 1754, it is the oldest library in the city, a place where a grandfather clock keeps time and the décor runs to "marble, murals, and mahogany." (Its patrons have included George Washington, Herman Melville, and Willa Cather, and though the reference room is open to the public, to borrow books you must pay a yearly membership fee of two hundred and twenty-five dollars.)

Rose has gone to the library to get the book "Hurricane," by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall (of "Mutiny on the Bounty" fame), recommended by friends who were on their own mission to become Nordhoff and Hall completists. But when she finds the book she realizes that she does not want to read it after all.

Looking around idly, she sees dozens of Nordhoff and Hall titles, and she has never heard of any of them. "What were the other books like?" she wonders. "Who were all these scribblers whose work filled the shelves? Did they find their lives as writers rewarding? Who reads their work now? Are we missing out?" It is a decidedly contemporary feeling, this fomo, this fear of missing out. She will conquer it.

Pat Moore shares these suggestions:

GETTING THE MOST OUT OF LIFE

Give more than you take.

Do your best to leave every situation better than you found it.

Seek beauty in all its forms.

Chase dreams.

Watch sunsets.

Endeavour to use more than 10 percent of your brain.

Don´t stifle your deep-from-the-gut, cleansing laughter.

Take a moment to ponder the enormity of the universe, then admit to yourself that you can´t possibly be the centre.

Breathe deeply.

Swim into the dark water.

Let yourself cry when your body tells you to.

Love more.

Delight in silliness.

Don´t be bitter.

Forgive. Forgive. Forgive.

- Katy Rhodes

SUGGESTED SITES

Shirley Coutts sends this link to a video of eight Irish priests in a sticky situation:

Zvonko Springer forwards the URL for a video of workers turning clay into mosaics, an arduous process that creates objects of surprising beauty:

Top 10 amazing facts about Canada - but they should not include our saying "abewt" for "about," which I have never heard in the five provinces in which I have lived:

Why is Canada not part of America? To answer this question, Tristan, an historian, tells us the story of how Canada remained independent of its southern neighbour:

In this video, Annie Leonard, who created The Story of Stuff, talks about the mountains of electronic waste created by manufacturers "designing for the dump." She asks why electronics designers cannot compete for the longest-lasting, most toxic-free products, and why electronics can´t be created in a way that enables them to be repaired:

Ron Finley plants vegetable gardens in South Central LA - in abandoned lots, traffic medians, along the curbs. Why? For fun, for defiance, for beauty and to offer some alternative to fast food in a community where the drive-throughs are killing more people than the drive-bys:

To check out the features of the "freedictionary," which changes daily, go to