Bits and Pieces 

Everything You Need to Know About Impressionism in 5 Minutes 

Most people that like modern art like Impressionist paintings. I wish that weren’t true. But it is.

Impressionism was an artistic movement that began in the 1860s in Paris. The Impressionists eschewed Realism, which depicted images more or less realistically, in favor of capturing a momentary impression.

Four of the best-known Impressionists were Sisley, Monet, Manet, and Renoir. They liked to paint outdoors, and made a fad of it. They called it painting en plein air.

I’m not a huge fan of Impressionism. When it’s good, it is reasonably good. But most of the time it’s not good. And when it’s not good, it is sentimental, gimmicky, and pandering.

There was, in France at the same time, a development in Modernism that I think is much better. It was Fauvism, led by André Derain.

Of course, the art world doesn’t care what I think. And neither should you. But you should care about knowing some of the basics of this movement if you want to have and voice an opinion on it. Here are a few things to get you started…

* Impasto – By using short, thick brushstrokes, the artist could create a visible 3-dimensional effect on the surface of the canvas.

* Broken Color Technique – It was believed that the artist could create a more vibrant visual effect by mixing colors optically, as the human eye does, rather than by physically blending the paint. It was done by making dots or scratches on the canvas.

* Number: 250 – The number of water lily pond paintings by Monet.

 * Year: 1824 – The year Monet painted “Impression, Sunrise,” from which the Impressionist movement was named.

 * Quote – “Impressionism: it is the birth of Light in painting.” (Robert Delaunay)

Fitness Trumps Slimness for Health and Longevity 

I was happy to hear about a just-released meta-study comparing the health benefits of diet/weight versus exercise/fitness. Fat people, the study concluded, are better off getting fit than losing weight.

Glenn Gaesser, a professor of exercise physiology at Arizona State University in Phoenix, and Siddhartha Angadi, a professor of education and kinesiology at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, reviewed more than 200 studies (involving tens of thousands of subjects) related to dieting, exercise, fitness, metabolic health, and longevity.

The results, they found, were not even close. “Compared head-to-head, the magnitude of benefit was far greater from improving fitness than from losing weight,” Dr. Gaesser said.

Specifically, their analysis showed that sedentary, obese people that improve their fitness can lower their risk of premature death by as much as 30% or more, even if their weight does not budge. On the other hand, they found that the health benefits of losing weight were inconsistent. Some studies showed that weight loss among obese people does not decrease mortality risks at all. And even those that showed a decrease, showed a decrease of about 16% or half of the results achieved by improving fitness.

Shel Silverstein: Much More Than I Knew 

I have always thought of Shel Silverstein as a cartoonist and author of children’s books. So, when I saw this photo of him last week, I was shocked:

Does that look like the face of the beloved creator of Don’t Bump the Glump!

It turns out that Silverstein was much more than a bestselling author of children’s books. He was also an essayist, a poet, a songwriter, and a playwright.

His songs have been recorded by the likes of Johnny Cash and The Irish Rovers. He won 2 Grammys and was nominated for a Golden Globe and an Academy Award.

Silverstein began drawing at age seven by tracing the cartoons of Al Capp. His first published drawings were in a student newspaper at Roosevelt University in Chicago, where he studied English. He spent time in the military, during which his cartoons were published in Pacific Stars and Stripes.

When he left the military, he returned to Chicago to study at the Art Institute, and began to submit cartoons to magazines while also selling hot dogs at Chicago ballparks. His cartoons appeared in Sports Illustrated, Look, and This Week.

He became well known in 1956 when “Take Ten,” the cartoon series he did for Pacific Stars and Stripes, was republished by Ballentine Books as Grab Your Socks! In 1967, his work began appearing regularly in Playboy, which sent him around the world to do an illustrated journal of his travels.

He wrote music and lyrics for Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show. He also composed original music for several films and played guitar, saxophone, piano, and trombone for those compositions. He cowrote Things Change with David Mamet. He also wrote stories for the TV project Free to Be…You and Me.

In an interview with Publisher’s Weekly, Silverstein said:

I think that if you’re a creative person, you should just go about your business, do your work, and not care about how it’s received. I never read reviews because if you believe the good ones, you have to believe the bad ones too. Not that I don’t care about success. I do, but only because it lets me do what I want…. People who say they create only for themselves and don’t care if they are published… I hate to hear talk like that. If it’s good, it’s too good not to share. That’s the way I feel about my work. So, I’ll keep on communicating, but only my way.

Here’s a friendlier photo of him:

He died in Key West in 1999, at the age of 68, from a heart attack.

Interesting Facts About Asia 

You’ve never been to Asia? Shame on you. And I bet you didn’t know that Asia is home to…

* The two most populous countries in the world (China and India), with a combined population of 2.8 billion. Third is the USA with a paltry 330 million.

* Four of the world’s nine nuclear powers: China, Pakistan, India, and North Korea.

* The world’s second- and third-largest economies: China and Japan.

* Almost all the largest Muslim countries, including Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Turkey, and Iran.

A Reader Asks: Is tequila all it’s cracked up to be? 

Hello Mark,

I am testing the world of tequila, mainly for where it stands in the area of health when it comes to spirits.  I finally realized about 5 years ago that the brown whiskies and beers, even though I liked them quite a bit, hurt me physically.  I have since been having only vodka and red wines.  I have known that tequila is reasonably good for you when it comes to alcohol, but I never really understood it.

I know you have a taste for tequila, so if you have any suggestions, it would be appreciated.

My reply:

I used to drink rum but it made me irritable. Tequila doesn’t have that effect on me. Also, it doesn’t give me a hangover… no matter how many shots I have on a given night. They say it’s the best for metabolic reasons. I’m not sure about that.

There are three basic types: blanco, reposado, and anejo. Blanco is clear and not aged… reposado is light golden and is aged up to a year… and anejo is golden brown and aged at least a year.

If you are mixing tequila with club soda or fruit juice, blanco is fine. If you want to drink it straight and savor it, the aged tequilas are usually better. You will get some of the variations you get with a good, smooth, aged whiskey.

For a tequila highball (usually made with club soda), I drink Casamigos Reposado. For tasting, my preference is for José Cuervo Reserva de la Familia.

Yes, that’s the same brand that produced rot-gut tequila back in the day. Now they are a big company and can afford to make what I think is one of the world’s best sipping tequilas.

The Benefits of Drinking 

Doc Eifrig, a friend and colleague, tells me that a drink or two of any alcoholic beverage has the following benefits:

* It provides high levels of an antioxidant called polyphenols, which lower your risk of heart disease and high cholesterol.

* It gives your immune system a boost.

* It activates the neurotransmitter gamma-aminobutyric acid, which is responsible for memory and nervous system function. This, according to two recent studies, could lower your risk of developing age-related cognitive decline – i.e.,  dementia or Alzheimer’s disease.

And if your drink of choice is, like mine, tequila, it  has the added benefit of being low in calories (80 per ounce).

3 Words I’m Trying to Work Into My Conversations 

* cattywampus refers to something that is in disarray, that is askew, or to something that isn’t directly across from something else. For example, a post office might be cattywampus to the library.

* tarradiddle is a petty lie or pretentious nonsense. A great example is that classic fisherman’s tale of “the fish that got away.”

* bumbershoot – a word that you may have heard in many a Disney film – is a humorous slang term for an umbrella.

Worth Quoting 

* “The longer I live, the more uninformed I feel. Only the young have an explanation for everything.” – Isabel Allende

* “When failure is reversible, act quickly. When failure is irreversible, think carefully.” – James Clear

* “Money is a singular thing. It ranks with love as man’s greatest source of joy.
And with death as his greatest source of anxiety.” – John Kenneth Galbraith

Bits and Pieces 

Diversity Quotas – Do Advocates Really Believe in Them? 

Wokeness: the pathology of believing one can be virtuous by advocating ideas one hasn’t thought about.

Example…

Diversity quotas: the policy of establishing institutional quota systems for groups based on race, ethnicity, or gender.

In this short video clip, college students are asked if they agree with the policy of using racial quota systems to achieve “representative” diversity in colleges, businesses, and other institutions. Without exception, they agree. Then they are asked another question, which lays bare the superficiality of their thinking and makes at least a few of them think about the question for the first time.

Smart Choices, Martha Stewart, and Computer Logic 

“Which car to buy?” “Which restaurant to eat at? “Which clothes to save and which to get rid of?”

“If I had a bit more time to research the alternatives and think about my choices, I could arrive at the best answer,” you might say. “Ain’t necessarily so,” according to Tom Griffiths, a computer logician.

In his TED Talk (below), Griffiths argues that many human problems – even mundane ones – are logically complex. Too complex to arrive at a “right” decision through research and hard thinking. To solve such problems, you must do what computers do, he says. And that means taking logical shortcuts.

One logical shortcut that works for quandaries like the three mentioned above is called the explore/exploit tradeoff. Griffiths explains it here…

By the way, recency of use, as Griffiths points out, is, in most cases, the most important criteria. I think it’s interesting that the two queens of domestic efficiency, Martha Stewart and Marie Kondo, include this as a key question.

Why Old Marketers Don’t Like New Ideas 

“The strategies that made you successful in the past will, at some point, reach their limit. Don’t let your previous choices set your future ceiling. The willingness to try new ideas allows you to keep advancing.”– James Clear

One of the many counterintuitive things I’ve learned in my business career is that senior marketing executives – who should be eager to keep up with and test new advertising trends – tend to be among the most resistant to them.

I believe there are two reasons for this.

1. Being competitive individuals, the best marketers like to promote and defend their own marketing ideas over those of others.
2. The insights and experiences they had early in their careers, which propelled them into senior positions, still feel valid to them, even in the face of contrary indications.

Thus, they are prone to dismissing new ideas as fool’s gold – superficially glittering but fundamentally flawed ideas that are unlikely to work because they don’t fit into their understanding of how things should work, which is based on their 20- and 30-year-old brilliant ideas.

In a recent blog post, James Clear discusses this. New ideas are often dismissed as gimmicks and toys, he says. “The first telephone could only carry voices a mile or two. The leading telco of the time, Western Union, passed on acquiring the phone because they didn’t see how it could possibly be useful to businesses and railroads – their primary customers.”

In our industry – information publishing – social media platforms are evolving at a rapid pace. I can’t keep up with them, but I hope our senior marketers will. Doing so will require them to resist their prejudices and keep an open mind.

A few of us were talking about how quickly information publishing is changing. When we got into it more than 40 years ago, everything was paper and postage stamps. The internet changed all that around the turn of the century. At that time, we paid attention and transitioned into digital publishing. The result was massive growth over the following 20 years, from $100 million to over a billion.

But today the landscape for digital publishing is very different than it was 20, or even 10, years ago. Social media is the name of the game and we’ve not been quick and able adaptors.

Speaking of Counterintuitive… Have You Heard of the Birthday Paradox? 

There were 14 of us at the Cigar Club last Friday. I mentioned that I shared a birthday with one of them, Tony. I mentioned it because I thought it was unusual. Nanie didn’t think so. He said he’d read that any time you have 23 people assembled, there is a better than even chance that two of them will have the same birthday.

I rolled my eyes.

“It’s true,” Louis said. “It’s called the Birthday Paradox.”

I took a sip of my José Cuervo Reserva de la Familia. “Have you ever heard of the Cigar Club Paradox?” I said. “Whenever you have more than 12 people assembled, there is a good chance someone will try to bullshit you.”

It turns out, the Birthday Paradox is a real thing. The next day, I received the following from both Nanie and Louis: two charts that prove it – and below that, a video that explains it. (Hint: It’s not really a paradox.)

(A) Probability of two people not sharing a birthday

(B) Probability of two people sharing a birthday

Click here to watch the video.

Kicking the Social Media Habit 

TD, a friend and colleague, was heavily addicted to social media.

“It got to a point where I was checking my phone 100 times a day… and 95% of the time, I’m not using my phone for anything urgent or important. I just cycle through the same six or seven apps, checking for updates or messages. It’s a form of escapism from boredom and anxiety,” he said. “One consequence of this ‘checking’ compulsion is that I’ve wasted a lot of time hunched over a tiny screen for no reward.”

He implemented a 3-part solution:

1. He replaced his smartphone with a flip phone.
2. He limited his use of the internet to one hour a day.
3. He limited his reading to books and other paper products.

He’s been at this for two months, but admits, “Frankly, I haven’t made a lot of progress.”

I became aware of the problem of email when I first began to use it regularly about 20 years ago. I was writing a daily blog back then called Early to Rise. Among other topics, I wrote about personal productivity.

“It’s becoming clear to me,” I wrote, “that email is going to be a major problem for me unless I get control of it. I find myself opening my email first thing in the morning and then spending several hours on it, but without much to show for it when I’m done. I think that’s because two-thirds of the nearly 100 emails I get each day are either (a) unrelated to my goals (and therefore distracting), (b) related to my goals, but trivial, or (c) messages from others asking me for favors.

“I don’t consider myself to be a morning person, but I’ve found I have the best focus and energy in the first three hours of the day. If I devote those precious hours to email, I’m not only wasting my best hours, I’m putting myself in the unfortunate position of having to do my important work when I’m tired and unfocused.”

The solution, which I recommended to my readers, was to do the important work first and save the email for later. “Break the habit of looking at your email first thing in the morning. Try to put off your email for as long as you possibly can.”

That one trick was a game-changer for me in terms of personal productivity. In the 21 years since I put that rule into practice, I’ve done all sorts of things I would never have done otherwise, including writing and publishing more than two dozen books, producing two movies, developing a non-profit community development center in Nicaragua, developing a 25-acre palm tree botanical garden in Florida, and a current project – building a museum of Central American art.

Social media wasn’t a distraction 20 years ago, but it is now. And to deal with it, I’ve added social media to my don’t-do-in-the-morning list.

After my important work is completed (which is usually in the mid-to-late afternoon, I open my email and sort it by urgency: (1) do today, (2) do this week, and (3) do this month. I do not respond to – in fact, I delete – anything I don’t have to do. Then I deal with my “do today” email, allowing myself no more than 2 hours. If I get it done in less than 2 hours, I work on some of my “do this week” email.

By the time I’m finished with email, it’s usually close to dinner time. I’ve done several hours of important work, and I’ve done all the less-important-but-still-necessary business work that comes via email. I have, in effect, finished working for the day. I am sometimes tempted to go on social media then, but I don’t. I go home and do my best to be sociable.

After dinner, I usually grab a cognac and cigar and sit outside. I spend an hour or on what I call “brain games” – i.e., the NYT crossword puzzle, Sudoku, and various quizzes, the sort of quizzes I sometimes pass along to you.

After that, I hit social media. I have a half-dozen “News & Views” sites that I go to first. I make notes and save some of them for future use. Then I move on to various “Entertainment” sites. These include odd and indefensible rabbit holes such as Karens in the Wild, The Professor (an amazing B-ball player), videos of bungling criminals, etc. A half-hour of this sort of low-brow fun is more than enough. Then I reward myself by reading a good book or watching a good movie.

I can’t say this system will work for everyone, but it works for me. It works for me because it is designed around my nature. I am not good at NOT doing things that I like to do, but I’m quite good at doing things that I think are good for me. By giving myself permission to partake in social media, I don’t feel like I’m depriving myself. But by doing a range of more important things first, I don’t have to worry that I’m wasting too much of my time on junk.

3 Words I’m Trying to Work Into My Conversations 

 * zaftig (Yiddish): Referring to a woman – having a full rounded figure; pleasingly plump; Example: “The actress playing the lead role was a zaftig blonde.”

 * quinary: Of the fifth order of rank. Example: “She discusses other mixtures, including those of the secondary through quinary colors.”

* gigil: A Filipino word describing that sudden urge to pinch or squeeze an unbearably cute object or a person. Example: “The baby was so adorable I had the gigil to squeeze its cheeks.”

Worth Quoting: Obituaries 

 Obituary notices are not usually a source of great fun…

“If one should not speak ill of the recently dead, unless they were utter monsters such as Pol Pot,” said Theodore Dalrymple, writing in Taki’s Magazine, “one should not speak facetiously of them, either.”

The temptation is nevertheless great…

“You should never say anything bad about the dead, only good,” said Bette Davis upon learning of Joan Crawford’s death. “Joan Crawford is dead. Good.”

How to Find Years of Enjoyment in a Moldy, 50-Cent, Garage-Sale Book 

I have this beautiful old book. It is hardbound, 500 pages thick, and has the potential to provide me with hundreds or even thousands of hours of learning and pleasure.

Titled Spanish – A Basic Course, and published in 1971, this is not the kind of textbook you are likely to find in bookstores today. It is too old-fashioned, too academic. I bought it at a flea market. It was sitting in a box full of books that looked as though they had been packed at least 20 years ago.

There is something sad about an old, discarded book. You look at it and think about all the time its author and publisher spent producing it. All those hours of careful thinking and critical revisions and the selection of typefaces and fonts and illustrations. If this particular book has been neglected and unread, what about all its siblings, all the other copies that were printed with such hope and good intentions? Are they also collecting dust? Have they too been disconnected from their purpose?

A book is a physical thing, but it serves as a link between two intellectual processes. On the one side is the thinking, planning, and care that goes into creating it. On the other side is the learning and imagining that takes place when it is read. A book that is not being read breaks that link. Every book that was made with effort and care deserves at least one comprehending mind to keep the link alive and justify its original purpose.

When I buy an old, obscure book like my Spanish textbook, I have the good feeling that I am rescuing something valuable from oblivion. But simply buying it and bringing it home is not enough. Left unread, rescued books are still orphans, transported from one miserable orphanage to a slightly better one. When I put Spanish – A Basic Courseon my bookshelf, I could almost hear it whispering to me: “Bring me back to life!”

And I did.

I don’t have a natural talent for learning languages. But I managed to learn French pretty well many years ago by immersing myself in a French-speaking environment for six weeks while I was training to be a Peace Corps volunteer in the French-speaking African country of Chad. I supplemented that “forced practice” by studying another beautiful old textbook.

Like my Spanish book, it had been written, used, and remaindered decades before I found it – and it was the perfect formal companion to the relatively relaxed learning experiences I was having during my training.

I don’t remember the names of the authors of that French textbook, but I am grateful to them and their publisher every time I go to France. Since the book was paperbound and almost 30 years old when I started using it, it didn’t survive my two-year stint in Chad. But I like to think I gave it one more chance to be what it was meant to be – like Rocky Balboa coming back for one more super fight – before it disintegrated.

This Spanish text is hardbound and a bit younger, so is likely to live as long as I do. And although it modestly describes its purpose as “to give the beginning student of Spanish a useful and working knowledge of the language,” it is clearly capable of doing much more. It is, in fact, an entire world of Spanish that could easily keep me enthralled and connected to its authors – Judith Noble, Elizabeth Fouad, and Jaime Lacasa (all of Iowa State University) – for a very long time.

The page before the cover page, for example, has occupied my imagination for several very satisfactory moments on several occasions. In the upper center of the page is the title.

Beneath that, there’s a box, stamped in ink, with the following warning:

Miami-Dade Community College Honor Court

Any unlawful sale or purchase of this book is prohibited. Violators will be prosecuted by the Honor Court or College Discipline Committee.

Below this, there’s a series of little boxes: “Bought By” and “Sold By.” In the first “Sold By” box, there is a signature in blue (looks like Elisa Albe) and some numbers (62875 and 00390). Elisa Albe, I am thinking, was either the librarian for Miami-Dade Community College or an officer of its Honor Court. I haven’t any idea what those numbers mean, but I wonder about them. And this Honor Court – what did it have to do with Spanish textbooks?

The next section of the book, spread over 20 pages, has about 50 photographs of life in Spain and Latin America. There are grainy images of peasants selling vegetables… vibrant shots of fishermen casting nets… romantic images of sombrero-ed sleepers under trees… full-color scenes of city streets… gloomy close-ups of wrinkled old men… and happy snapshots of beautiful young women.

There is something about these photographs – about the fact that they were taken more than 50 years ago and that the people in them are probably dead now – that makes me wistful. I like looking at them, though. And the more I look at them, the more mysterious and beautiful they seem. I have gazed at these pictures with satisfaction dozens of times, and yet I feel like I will be able to look at them with pleasure and wonder for the rest of my life.

The bulk of this hefty book is devoted to the teaching of Spanish. Each chapter begins with a dialog that contains both the vocabulary and the grammar that will be taught in the 20 or so pages that follow. The vocabulary is taught through the repeated use of the intended words in practice sentences and subsequent test questions. The grammar is taught traditionally, as if it were Latin, from which – of course – Spanish is derived. At the end of all the chapters is a list of irregular verbs, conjugated for quick reference, followed by a glossary and an index.

The text is set in an elegant typeface. I don’t recognize the font exactly, but it is round and balanced with serifs – like a Palatino or a well-fed Times Roman. And the size of the type makes for an accessible look and easy reading – attractive features for an aging language student like me.

This morning, sipping coffee, I sat on the porch and studied Chapter 23 – a lesson on the passive voice. Like English, Spanish permits its speaker to construct a sentence actively, such as “John ate the apple” (Juan como el manzana) or passively, such as “The apple was eaten by John” (El manzana fue comido por Juan).The information is neatly organized and explained. The instructions are clear. The pace is comfortable. The authors give me plenty of opportunity to review.

The more I read this book, the fonder I become of those three people who may no longer be living but whose hard work back in the 60s is still giving me instruction and pleasure today. I want to thank them for doing it.

Not all of our books can be as dear to us as this one is to me. But we should all have at least a handful of books that can be cherished as long as the binding holds.