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Jeremy Wagstaff of Loose Wire Blog made an observation from a somewhat different point of view about how university students are apparently using borrowing appropriating stealing each other’s material when writing their student application forms. A study found that quite a large percentage used the same anecdotes and phrases, indicating a common source. (It’s worth the three minutes it will take to read his post. No worries, I’ll wait.)

While I can’t imagine anyone actually being surprised by this revelation, a little farther in the post he says,

“… in other ways, it reflects two things, one positive, one negative:

• the online world favors collaboration and cooperation. Student applicants in a very competitive environment are happy and willing to share their experiences and their material. This is a real community.
• the online world doesn’t necessarily favor originality, creativity or individuality. We have too much prior information, too much of an idea of what the benchmark and received procedure are, so what we do create tends to be bland and unoriginal.”[emphasis mine]

Yeah, right. Nothing like putting a positive spin on things to hide the reality. It’s like praising a successful bank robber because he was able to accomplish such a complex goal as robbing a bank!

Good gosh, there’s so many different ways we could go with this one, I don’t know which one to focus on first! (Augh! Brain freeze! Brain freeze!) So how about let’s start with the emphasized text above (after all, it’s WHY I super-sized emphasized it).

Is it really true that collaboration produces work that’s “bland and unoriginal”? I don’t know about you, but doesn’t that second conclusion simply cry out for debate? (To be completely candid, it really seems to beg a sharp whack on the back of the head.) Oh, but wait, there’s that little qualifier word: “necessarily”.

Now let’s consider the ludicrous conclusion: “I’d say the problem is with the personal statement approach, not unoriginal students desparate to do whatever gets them into medical school.”

Uh, excuse me? Doesn’t this seem more like a comment about the symptom and not the disease? I mean, c’mon Jeremy, why blame the university for the slack attitudes of these student applicants?

Is it really too much to ask that the students, as John Housman in the old E. F. Hutton commercial used to say, “earn it”?

You know, it would just be absolutely finer than a frogs hair if you would subscribe to my RSS feed!

And now for a modern day parable.

Tom runs a small construction company, which of course used pickup trucks for the transportation and delivery of materials. Business had been pretty good lately, so one day he bought three new trucks and had them delivered to the company’s compound the next morning. Tom had the drivers park in a very visible place.

All day long they sat, parked right smack in the middle of the construction yard; in fact, vehicles coming in and out actually had to go around them. As the day progressed, sooner or later nearly everyone had spent a few minutes admiring the shiny new trucks, opening the doors, even looking under the hood. Finally, towards the end of the day, Tom called for an all-employees meeting to be held out by the trucks.

At the appointed time, he stepped out of his office, walked straight to the first truck, picked up a hammer, and proceeded to whack the hood of the truck about ten times in rapid succession, badly damaging it. He proceeded to the next truck; then the next. Needless to say, everyone was stunned into silence.

Tom turned to them and smiled, and said, “There! Now they’re used trucks. Drive ‘em!” Then he calmly walked back to his office.

True story. Honest.

Parables are stories that are told to illustrate an idea. Now, rather than me drawing the lesson here and wrapping it all up for you, I’m going to let you have a shot at it! Go ahead, put on your thinking caps, and tell me (go ahead, I double-dog dare you!) what idea does this parable teach you?

You know, it would just be absolutely finer than a frogs hair if you would subscribe to my RSS feed!

If you find yourself occasionally running on empty and searching for some encouragement, inspiration or perhaps even just a chuckle or two, you’ve come to the right place! Check these out:

• “You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” – Jack London
• “If I own company FOO, I don’t need employees with a passion for FOO. I want those with a passion for the work they’re doing. The company should behave just like a good user interface.” – Kathy Sierra
• “No matter how rich you become, how famous or powerful, when you die the size of your funeral will still pretty much depend on the weather.” – Michael Pritchard
• “We live in a Newtonian world of Einsteinian physics ruled by Frankenstein logic.” – David Russell
• “The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they’re going to have some pretty annoying virtues.” – Elizabeth Taylor
• “When you’re through changing, you’re through.” – Bruce Barton
• “Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.” – Abraham Lincoln
• “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” – Peter Drucker
• “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.” – Henry David Thoreau
• “Whenever I dwell for any length of time on my own shortcomings, they gradually seem to become mild, harmless, engaging little things, not at all like the staring defects in other people’s characters.” – Margaret Halsey
• “You can never learn less. You can only learn more.” – Buckminster Fuller
• “I do not have a psychiatrist and I do not want one, for the simple reason that if he listened to me long enough, he might become disturbed.” – James Thurber
• “It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety. – Isaac Asimov
• “If there is ever another war in Europe, it will come out of some damned silly thing in the Balkans.” – Otto von Bismarck (1898)
• “A sense of duty is useful in work, but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not be endured with patient resignation. – Bertrand Russel
• “Ours is the age that is proud of machines that think and suspicious of men who try to.” – H. Mumford Jones
• “The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire.” – Ferdinand Foch
• “No matter what side of the argument you are on, you always find people on your side that you wish were on the other.” – Jascha Heifetz
• “Anger is the feeling that makes your mouth work faster than your mind.” – Evan Eser
• “Basic research is what I am doing when I don’t know what I am doing.” – Wernher von Braun
• “If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of some expert saying it couldn’t be done.” – Peter Ustinov
• “In the history of the world, there always has been and always will be more horse’s asses than horses.” – Jeffrey Fry
• “Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what’s for lunch.” – Orson Welles
• “Quit worrying about your health. It’ll go away.” – Robert Orben
• “There are only two kinds of scholars; those who love ideas and those who hate them.” – Emile Chartier
• “With hurricanes, tornados, fires out of control, mud slides, flooding, severe thunderstorms tearing up the country from one end to another, and with the threat of bird flu and terrorist attacks, are we sure this is a good time to take God out of the Pledge of Allegiance?” – Jay Leno
• “Men are not against you. They are merely for themselves.” – Gene Fowler
• “I know that there are people who do not love their fellow man, and I hate people like that!” – Tom Lehrer
• “Acquaintance, n.: A person whom we know enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.” – Ambrose Bierce
• “If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.” – Isaac Asimov
• “If this is coffee, please bring me some tea; if this is tea, please bring me some coffee.” – Abraham Lincoln

And finally, as a final pithy thought (try to say that real fast three times!) before you go on with your day:

• “Men who never get carried away should be.” – Malcolm Forbes

You know, it would just be absolutely finer than a frogs hair if you would subscribe to my RSS feed!

You probably think the picture is a mistake. Read on…

Have you ever found yourself wondering just how much influence you, as a blogger, really have? I mean sure, we all have our circles of influence, big or small, but just how far does that circle really extend? It’s something I imagine most bloggers probably wonder about, especially when first getting started. (I know I did!)

Years ago, while on an 8-hour-long night flight from Miami to San Paolo, Brazil, I remember waking up at 2 a.m., somewhere along the way, and wondering exactly where we were. A flight attendant just happened to be passing by at that moment, so I asked.

“Oh, we’re over the Amazon basin at about 45,000 feet,” she cheerfully replied. (You have to admire how flight attendants can stay cheerful at 2 a.m.!) “We still have a long way to go, so I suggest you try to sleep the rest of the way,” she added helpfully.

I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced total darkness. We’re talking really dark, “bottom of a cave in the deepest part of the earth” darkness. It’s quite an experience, let me tell you! In spite of the fact that you know there is no light, you soon find yourself straining to see something, anything that can provide a reference point. For some people the oppressiveness is so powerful, it can actually feel like a physical weight.

So maybe you’ll understand when I tell you that as I looked out the window, there was nothing to see. I mean, literally nothing! No cities, no towns; the sky was so dark the horizon was not even visible. It was as if the windows had been painted black.

I stared out the windows, searching for something, anything, that would tell me there was a world out there. My eyes began to strain, searching for a reference point. Then – in the distance below, I saw the most beautiful sight.

A light. One single light.

As the plane slowly moved closer, just the sight of a reference point out there was enough to somehow comfort me. My eyes fastened on that light as if it were the only thing that mattered. I didn’t care what it was for; being able to watch as it passed by was enough.

But then I began to wonder about that light, and what it represented. In fact, I did more than wonder, I began to be amazed. At 45,000 feet, plus perhaps the same distance away horizontally, that meant the distance to that light was about – let’s see, divide by 37, carry the 8, (excuse me, I have to take off my shoes for this one) – that’s about 12 miles (19 km) away!

I was wonderstruck by the fact that one single light could be visible from such a distance!

So I ask you: Did whoever put the light there intend it to be visible from 12 miles away? Did they go to the Amazonian Hardware Store and say to the proprietor, “Good day to you sir; I’d like a lamp so powerful that airliners can see it 12 miles away!”

Or did they only intend to light up their own little corner of the world?

Sometimes it strikes me nearly speechless (luckily I don’t have to talk to type!) how far a few typewritten words can travel these days, thanks to tools like the internet and blogging. I mean, I discovered a blog the other day written by some guy in Iceland. Iceland! Did he decide one day, “You know, I’m going to reach the world”? Or did he just start writing, expressing himself, and being himself in a way that others could see and appreciate? Then one day, I passed by and saw his light, stopped by for a bit, and grew.

Now if you’re a new blogger, you will probably have said to yourself (at least, oh, a thousand times by now), “Ok, I’m blogging. But is anyone out there reading it?” The fact is, as a blogger, you have a much farther reach than you may ever have thought possible.

So whether an old hand or a beginner, may I just offer you this one little bit of encouragement:

You never know how far your light will shine. Or who, one night, might be flying in darkness and find they are in need of a reference point. Don’t be afraid to turn on the switch. Don’t worry about how much wattage you may or may not have. Just be yourself and let your light shine. They’ll come.

You can be that light in the darkness.

You know, it would just be absolutely finer than a frogs hair if you would subscribe to my RSS feed!

Speaking of roads, I tagged Liz Strauss the other day with what Karin started calling the Turtle meme, so it only seems fair that Liz would turn it around on me! Sheesh, this thing’s getting more convoluted than the season finale of that ever-popular daytime soap opera, As the Worm Turns.

This time, she’s challenging me with a cyclogical psichlogical psycherflumigal mental survey she first heard from a psychologist (see? I can too spell it!) friend. OK, Liz, I’ll play along; I like challenges.

It consists of four questions:

1. You’re walking on a road. It’s your road. Tell me about it.
2. As you walk, you pass a body of water, describe it.
3. Directly in your path is an empty bottle. What’s your response to it?
4. You continue until you find yourself facing a wall that crosses your road perpendicularly. What do you do?

Now this is going to take a bit of faith on my part as to what this is all about; after all, I’m answering these before I read Liz’s responses. So if it somehow proves I’m, you know, insane or something, it’s not my fault! So here goes…

1. My road is a two-lane black asphalt road, with a stripe on each edge and down the middle that is the exact color of the flowers which also happen to cover the ground on both sides of the road. (In Texas we call them Indian Paintbrushes.) The sun is high and warm, and the land is rolling, curving and dipping smoothly over and around the hills, sometimes disappearing in the near distance, and reappearing farther away. There are no other people on the road but me, and I’m walking westward into a soft summer breeze.
2. The road dips a bit between hills, and crosses a small, fast-moving river. It’s about twenty feet wide, but not deep, with boulders and smooth, many-colored, hand-sized rocks embedded in its sandy bottom. The water looks very cool and inviting, and there’s a perfect spot for a quick wade.
3. An empty beer bottle? It’s a blight of trash on an otherwise perfect road. I pick it up to take it somewhere to be disposed of. It doesn’t bother me that I might have to carry it for miles, it’s too perfect a scene to leave it.
4. Hmm, what’s this wall doing here? How did it get here? Why would there be a wall here? What idiot would block a perfectly good road by placing a wall across it? I would try to figure out a way to climb it to see what’s on the other side, assuming it’s not so high as to be impossible to climb. Otherwise, I’d probably turn left and follow it until I reached the end or found someone to tell me why the wall was there.

All right, there you have it, four answers to four simple questions. Now, whatever does it mean? Maybe I should read the rest of Liz’s post now, before pushing the “Publish” button?

Or… do I feel lucky?

You know, it would just be absolutely finer than a frogs hair if you would subscribe to my RSS feed!

Well, this is weird. I’m adding some widgets to the template, and now the text size has gone bonkers over the center and right side columns. The text should like like that in the left column. Hmmph.

Anybody have a clue how to fix that?

UPDATE

As my grandpa used to say (he was a carpenter), “A good carpenter always blames his tools.”

I’ve been tinkering with all the widgets on both sidebars, and apparently the one that displays the “Quote of the Day” somehow affects text sizes and justification for all the rest! Don’t know how or why. Thank goodness for the Wordpress toolbox*! Looks like everything is back to where it belongs.

*In case you didn’t know, Wordpress installation includes a toolbox - but it contains nothing but eleven sizes of hammers. You just pick the appropriate size and start whacking. Works, too.

You know, it would just be absolutely finer than a frogs hair if you would subscribe to my RSS feed!

Welcome to the new, improved Middle Zone Musings! It’s great to finally get out of the dastardly clutches Blogger and on my own domain!

It’s going to take me a few days at least to get things organized around here. Please bear with me as I dust and mop, sweep and vacuum the new digs. Lots of things to do!

There will be still more changes; a few things that might take time to get into place. There’s feeds, the Technorati Fave button, that MyBlogLog widget, and lots of other odds and ends. Plus, now that I’m using Wordpress, I’ve got a veritable plethora (like my new word? found it on my word-a-day toilet paper) of widgets and plugins to play with (oh, goody, goody!)

Hopefully I can still keep the usual once-a-day pace, barring any unforseen problems (like if I inadvertently do something weird to the Wordpress theme and accidently get sucked down a wormhole. Hey, don’t laugh - I read about it in the National Enquirer just last week.)

And as I said before (at the old site), any suggestions, advice, ideas, good links, great plugins, handy widgets, money or rants you care to send my way will be truly appreciated! I have no pride to lose here, folks, so now’s your chance to show off all those things you’ve already learned the hard way. Just post your suggestions in the comments.

And if I don’t use your suggestions, please don’t be offended; I promise to at least consider everything.

I’d also like to say again how much I appreciate the help of the honorable Mr. William Tully of LOGICal eMOTIONs, who not only helped me get started, but actually set the site up for me! Talk about your above and beyond! Many thanks, Tully, you’re a Prince among men!

Let’s get started, and see where we end up, shall we?

You know, it would just be absolutely finer than a frogs hair if you would subscribe to my RSS feed!