5 Questions, July 2025 ---------------------- Well yay - Christina has graced gopherspace with another set of "5 Questions!" [1] I very much welcome the return of this time-honoured tradition. Not only because I enjoy seeing the oft-times surprising and enlightening replies from other folks out here in the digital boondocks, and not just because it saves me from having to think up things to write about, but even more because it saves us all from yet another one of my curmudgeonly posts about the current state of information technology. I can be curmudgeonly about something else for a change. Everybody wins! 1. Has a self-help book ever helped you? If yes, would you share the title and author? If by "self-help" is meant a book sold in the "self-help" section in bookstores, then I think the answer is no, never read one. Why is that, I wonder? Certainly there were times in my life when I needed help dealing with my personal problems. But whatever I got in that line tended to come direct from various people in my life, not mediated through the printed page. That might be surprising, I guess, given how bookish I am. I think it was a kind of suspicion (perhaps tinged with snobbishness) that led me to avoid the self-help section, a mistrust of an industry whose generous profit margins seemed rooted in exaggerated claims and encouraging false hopes. Which may well be an entirely unfair generalization, as it clearly has no basis in my personal experience. That said, I have read books that helped sort out some things in my head, it's just that they were shelved in other parts of the bookstore. Here I will mention Charles Taylor's "Malaise of Modernity" (1991), a short philosophical take on the culture of the self - the deeply odd modern imperative to seek self-actualization in the abandonment of social ties - as fundamentally a contradiction that collapses upon itself. Taylor convincingly argues that our horizons of significance, those ideas and beliefs which give our lives meaning, can only be articulated in the context of the communities of which we are a part. 2. How many times a month do you cook dinner at home? Do you plan most of your meals, or do you start by looking in the refrigerator to see what hasn't gone bad? I do not cook dinner very often, as my wife enjoys cooking and is much better at it than I am. (I do most of the dishes and laundry though, so I'm not a total deadbeat). Typically when I make dinner (let's not call it cooking) it's because she's out of town. It will inevitably be something simple like frozen pizza, spaghetti and meatballs, hot dogs, or hamburgers. 3. Where do you get your recipes for #2? If you have multiple cookbooks do you rotate them? My wife has shelves full of cookbooks but I think gets a lot of her recipes from the Internet. I mostly just read the instructions on the back of the frozen pizza box. 4. If you've gone antiquing or thrift store shopping, what is one of your great finds? I seldom do it these days (unless you count used book stores), but there were times in the past that scavenging in thrift stores was a great source of entertainment. As much as finding cool things to buy, it was about rummaging through the cast offs of other people's lives and trying to imagine the folks who had listened to all those corny records in houses illuminated by tacky lamps, their shelves full of souvenir tchotchkes. If this holds less appeal for me in the present, it's likely because I can now foresee a time when the cast-off detritus of my own life will provide momentary amusement to some supercilious hipster wandering the aisles of Value Village. I still recall finding a viyella shirt, black watch tartan, beautifully made, perfect fit, almost new, for two dollars in a pop-up thrift store near Main and King Edward. I wore it until it fell apart. 5. What would make, or has made, you more patriotic? Well, just hypothetically, a bloviating goon threatening our national sovreignty might do the trick. Reference --------- [1] Christina, July 2025 Five Questions gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~christina/2025-07-09.txt Sat 19 Jul 2025 03:54:33 PM PDT