RETRO POST -- RETRO WHAT?

                   

 Hi.  Welcome to my retro post, totally handwritten, in what used to be known aS longhand but now masquerades as cursive...my very own, arthritically damaged handwriting.  Enjoy!

Needless to say...

I was called into the head office and told that my services were no longer desired.
I have subsequently learned that the 
kindergarten teachers can't read cursive either.
Maybe we should go back to hieroglyphics...they have such pretty birds on their walls!

CORPORATE CULTURE AND THE TRANSLATOR

Raining cats and dogs

How do you want me to say it? 

I have choices, but I cannot read your mind and I do not know your internal culture

Several years ago I worked for some large international corporations and I had to produce legal agreements to be used between the corporation and outside interests in laguages other than English.  In one of these companies we drew up a list of conventional intra company terms [sometimes referred to as "argot"] that would not be translated into the language of the outside interest, but were to remain in the language defined by the corporate culture of the company for which I was working.  This was often the case with technical acronyms.  One of these was AQL (Aceptable Quality Level).  There were others in engineering and in accounting and in purchasing as well.

The point I want to make is that a good translator will try to identify what, if any of the terms used in a legal, or even paralegal document are to be or not to be translated according to accepted and established corporate culture.  The professional translator is aware of some of these idiosyncrasies and inquires from the client which ones they are. 

Verifying this from the outset can prevent discomfort and discontent between the client and the translator.  

SCHOOLS KILL CREATIVITY -- NOT

This, I have to make a part of my life.
In the San Diego Reader,  Thomas Larson wrote a cover article on August 14, 2013,

"College? no thanks"

I congratulate Mr. Larson because as far as "Reader" articles go, this was one I really appreciated.  Not all "Reader" writers are created equal.  Mr. Larson is one of those who attracted my attention and kept it for all 5,000 words.  Good English, good syntax, good style, good job.
Here's why I read, and, I must admit, reread this article.

For most of my upbringing, a good 15 to 18 years of it anyway, I would hear my father, otherwise known to you all as EFR Dion, say: "Yeah, my brothers have a lot of education, but they don't know anything."
My uncles were on the G.I. Bill after serving in the armed forces during WWII.  They had not graduated yet, so while they were in school, they had very limited resources.  EFR's auto was their preferred mode of transportation when the friendly confines of Fenway Park, 100 miles to the east, would beckon.  Their predilection for the American League Red Sox was always a mystery for us.  We were smarter than that, we had adopted the National League Braves as our team.
But that was not the limit of their lack of "smarts."  They somehow usually returned the vehicle with nothing left in the tank but the smell of the fuel.  Every time that they did this, I was sure that the day of Sodom and Gomorrah had arrived.  But no, the storm would pass and all would be well again.
EFR had left high school at age 15 because his father had died and left the family with 8 children behind.  It was 1928 or so.  Yes, indeed, great depression time.  Read more about him here.  I have to get to the point.
The brothers who went to college turned out to be excellent teachers and later in life, successful entrepreneurs.  They were creative.  Music and poetry was their forte.  There was another brother who eschewed the G.I. Bill and went right back to work as a tool and die designer, and as any tool and die designer who ever lived, I'm the best damn designer out there.  You will never meet the second best tool and die maker.
So, I grew up in a polyglot, cultural teapot that was steaming with both, creativity and education.  There is no way that anyone, in my opinion, can make an absolute statement that school at any level, college and university included, crushes creativity.  I say that fearlessly.  Mr. Larson in his article, positive as it may appear on the surface about skipping college, carried a definite undertone of feeling that no matter what his interlocutors told him, the possibility of a college education remained a presence inside of them.
Personally, I've got a masters degree in a "soft science."  [Theology] I've had a string of jobs.  I've failed at some and I've excelled at some.  I can honestly say that my long stay in school has had its positive influence on my life and even some negative influence.  But never has it crushed my creativity.
One of the jobs that I held for many years was the recruitment of engineers and other professionals and managers.  I have seen up close and in living color, the difference between the "self-made" professional, technical or administrative,  and the fully degreed, =/>2.50 graduate. Give me the one with the solid educational achievement 90 percent of the time.  Yes, I leave a ten percent gap there to accommodate the exception.  (See EFR Dion, above and linked)

The difference is in mental discipline.  Not emotional nor physical discipline.  Mental discipline.  Mental discipline allows for creative solutions at the end of a logical development that follows the intellectual parameters of the science within which the task is planned and followed by the path taken in its execution.  The person who has a foundation in those laws and practices is more successful at planning the outcome of the project, is more successful at solving the unexpected deviations from the plan caused by the pressure of certain variable realities that are not always possible to foresee.  The scientifically trained, disciplined mind can identify these deviations more quickly and institute corrective action more quickly and effectively that the one with practical experience only. Creativity is a child of mental discipline acquired through education. Creativity is not a corollary of experience.

Many years ago I read a poem that made a point of saying that the creative little person who was witty, musically inclined and lovable was crushed when he entered school because the discipline forced him into line with the herd and the nerd.  That is a reality that exists.  I know.  I have a son who is perhaps a product of that reality.  I know that there are people who would very much like their pursuit of art (or of financial gain) to be their only discipline. They point to the great rules breakers of all times, Picasso, Shakespeare, Moliere and a hundred more that I can't name here.  I just want to say that before Shakespeare could bend grammar to his art, he had to prove that he knew that he was breaking the rules and he also could prove why he wanted it that way.  Maybe Shakespeare graduated from an institution of higher learning.  I don't know, but I'd bet that he did.

I beg of you not to bring up Bill Gates and his leaving of Harvard.  It is well documented as coming from Bill Gates personally that he and his friend dropped out of Harvard because they were afraid that if they did not bring their ideas to closure that they would be overtaken by others. Gates and Paul Allen are an example that education, science and creativity go hand in hand.

I could go on, but I won't.  I'll leave you with my point.  This discussion has no end because there is too much truth on both ends of the rope.  I have avoided the political aspect of the discussion.  My math is not up to par to allow me to hold my own there.  What can you expect from a Theology major?
My point is that creativity is the child of solid education.  It is the child of strict mental discipline, a skill usually acquired through education.
Let me paraphrase a traditional dictum that comes from the old Greek philosophers:  The highest truths can be learned through personal investigation, but at the cost of great effort over a great amount of time.
This holds true for pure science as well as for art and athletics.

Look around.  It's true.

IS IT A LIE,OR...?

Many times I sit down and I scratch my head to look for the thought that I had at 2:00 PM and told myself that I did not want to forget because it was soooo hot!!  You've seen me brag about writing 600 of these "thoughts" and now we're on 601 and I have been sitting on it alllll day!  ...and I have not forgotten.

It is about a person whom I know, and have known for lo! these many years and I have always been trying to figure out just how much of what I hear I should believe.  Now we all know someone like this.  Many of us, myself included, know that some people who know us wonder the same thing about us.  So, it's not that anyone is immune to the situation.  It is, however an interesting place in my life that this conviction about the one individual of whom I write took so long to take root.  The other interesting thing about my conviction is that I am now glad that I am formally settled into the conviction that I have come to know that I am not being lied to.  I know that I will continued to enjoy my relationship with this friendly human creature.  Even though everything that I get from that direction is not the purest, pure truth.

This person is not a liar.  This person knows what the truth is.  It's just that there is a drive to make the truth appear better that what it really is so that I will be attracted to it.  The truth is always present in everything communicated, but it comes wrapped up in different ways as time progresses.  It's just up to me to find it.  It's like the same person with a different pair of glasses or a different haircut. I just have to get used to the different styles and cut through the embellished truth to see where the root of the message really is. You have to admit, this is an on-going conundum. It's a good thing, though.  With this puzzle in my life, I won't have to spend too much on crossword puzzles any more.  

The negative I can discover here is that instead of drilling down for the truth within the person, I just may enjoy myself playing with the puzzle rather that empathizing with the puzzler.

The good part about all this is that I really love this individual.

With an attitude like that, why cry at my funeral?

599 + this 1 = 600 -- CELEBRATE BY READING IT

HEY!  I didn't think that I had 600 thoughts in my coconut.  6 or 16 maybe, but 600...Not on your life. That's a 600 page book for crying out loud!

Thank you, Tom

The interesting thing about it all is that I have some that I will never publish.  I have been pushing them out of the line of fire for nearly three years now.  I am glad that I have had the common sense and the circumspection to stay away from certain expressions of my convictions.  I do not feel squeezed or encumbered by any of this.  I don't feel as though my freedom has been tethered and curtailed because of my decision to keep certain personal and family facts off the pixellated page and away from the consciousness of the readers.  Believe me, this is true.

Those of you who get email from me fairly often, and even those who get email from me occasionally can see that I have more than one blog containing my ramblings.  I don't know why, but lately I have been reading quite a bit of what I have written at random.  I kid you not, random.  Stuff from many years back.  Stuff that appeared long before I was answering the challenge of the 365 Thoughts in one year.  Some of it is really good.  Some of it makes my eyes bug out and make me say, "Did I write that?"  Just as well, some of it makes me wrinkle my nose and say, "I wrote that &*%@+~??..."  So you see, I do know the difference between right and wrong.

It is true that I have some wonderful experiences that would really look good on paper.  They would really be wonderful snapshots of my journey along the road of life but I do not feel compelled to release them into the ethernet.  I think that sometime early in the series I mentioned that I would refrain from using foul language and staying away from the seemier adventures that I have experienced.  For the most part, I have done that.  Not that all that is secret is seemy.  Nope.  Some of it is quite elegant, really, but this is not the place for it.  Not according to me, anyway.

This blog is one thing. The blog "No Crying at my Funeral" is quite another.  It is meant to be an expression of my experience as a Cradle Catholic who neither could nor would be anything but.  It is a Catholic life style blog from the point of view of someone who knows the Catholic Religion from the inside out and who tries to live according to the expectations of that Religion.  This blog is part and parcel of an online Catholic Life Style weekly magazine.  I have some five or six years of contributions to that endeavor.  There too, there is some amazing stuff...on both sides of the meaning of amazing stuff.  The fact that I have a masters degree in Theology from a prestigious Vatican University doesn't protect me from producing some really horrible stuff.  It also doesn't guarantee that the good stuff is equally good all the time.

You see, I just told you that I was enjoying some of the old stories that I produced.  When I lit up my computer this evening, I saw that I had written 599 articles under this title of 365 Thoughts.  So, why not open my heart a little bit and let you in.  I still have some tellable tales.  My #2 son has asked me for one.  I have some that I have been thinking about.  Nostalgic stuff.  You know like, "Given inflation, is today's $0.99 store the .05 and .10 of yesterday?"  "How many times have you been knocked out in your life?"

Tomorrow (Today?) is Hiroshima day.  60 years now, I think, or maybe more.  The other day was the end of the Korean war, 50 years ago.  We in South Hadley have a bad memory of that.  A sweetheart young man named Mike Barney was killed after the armistice in that war.  So see, I still have stuff that I can talk about all the while keeping secret what I want to keep secret and not feeling crimped by it one single bit.  Good, bad or indifferent, there's plenty of other stuff to put out there.  Maybe I'll do better when I produce # 601!

HEY, THAT'S MINE -- THAT TOO -- HEY, LOOK AT WHAT I HAVE HERE