Humor

A Relaxier Life

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

It is said that Albert Einstein once asked, “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, what are we to think of an empty desk?” While not famous for his quips—although E=mc2 is the soul of wit in its brevity—this neatly captures the perspective of a person who kept his desk almost confrontationally cluttered.

The human mind is an organizer, the greatest one we happen to know, the one that all of our tools and machines are built in an attempt to replicate its principles and imagined actions. Nature itself does not organize. Every organizing structure we come up with is an imposition on nature and is thus radically random, at least as far as nature is concerned: No method of organizing is more “correct” than any other.
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Wrong Again

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

This morning, I became a grown-up: I attempted to remove glasses from my face that were already in my fist.

For those of you who are lifelong glasses-wearers (it is almost 40 years for me), you know that there are several distinct methods of removing eyeglasses and several messages that can be communicated in the manner of their removal. Off the top of my head, there’s “Two-handed and Thoughtful,” “One-handed and from the Right and Peeved” (I usually accidentally fling my glasses to the floor or across my desk with that one), and “One-handed and from the Left and Trying to Get to the Heart of Things.” There are others. Putting them on in front of people usually communicates this: “Enough Fun, Everyone. Back to Work.”

It can be like semaphore, but with glasses.
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The Curse of the Should-Have-Dones

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I do not know the attractive couple entering the above photo from the left side of the frame, but that is okay, as I did not take the photo, and this is not about them.

If I had a steadier hand with the photo-editing Clone Stamp tool, the two of them would instead be an oddly tall bush of purple flowers or another stack of blue Peroni umbrellas or two more versions of the bicycle that they are walking towards.

My hand is not that steady with the photo-editing tools, so their brief moment together (are they still together?) was spared awkward editing. May the rest of their lives together or the remainder of their lives apart continue to be free of terrible editing decisions or (yikes!) deletion by a heavy-handed photo perfectionist like me.
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