Tag: Stephen Hawking

Women: mystery and macho

I wasn’t the one who opened up this Pendora box.

Stephen Hawking did. In a recent interview, he had mentioned that the biggest mystery in the universe was women.

You and I could have said that.

Girl with the Dragon Tatoo.

Girls gone wild.

Valley girls.

In 2011, we got an election in Liberia which gave us not one but three Nobel-prize winners, all women.

Germany, Argentina, Brazil, Australia, Byrma, Thailand…you name it.

From G.I. Joe to G.I. Jane.

In the Middle.East, not to be upstaged, some women stepped up to be suicide bombers.

Recently, a 911 caller asked if it was OK to shoot an intruder. The response, “go ahead, and take the shot”.

They could have gotten Bin Laden much earlier with similar order.

So intrigued with Larsson’s Tatoo Girl, Hollywood bought the rights to produce its own version.

Mystery indeed and macho in fact.

I grew up surrounded by strong women.

They lift, carry loads, feed babies, ride cycles, drive cars, cook, clean, teach, scream, and most of all, keep going in face of extreme hardships (even this long list doesn’t do justice).

I have come face to face with female victims of piracy, with doctor-turned-refugee, with singer-turned-shopper.

I have worked with team mates who turned VP, widow and writer.

Mystery!

Hawking has spent a lot of time on wheel chairs. He must have logged in a lot more research time than any of us about this “mystery”  that, to him, still eludes comprehension.

I remember that morning when the Challenger blow up (we were watching it live), taking away our dear (female) teacher in a smoke.

Or the congress woman from Tucson who is now recovering from an assassin’s bullet through the head.

The Big Three networks have all experimented with solo female anchors: CBS w/ Connie Chung, then later, Katie Couric. ABC with Diane Sawyer.

We trusted women to deliver the news (after all, they delivered us all in the first place).

Yet, we have problems accepting their strengths (when asserted to the extreme as in Larsson’s character).

I know one thing: the financial mess we are in must have caused more by men’s greed than women’s (more nurturing in nature).

And it will be a mystery to us all to get out of it unscathed, thanks to you-know-who.

(hint: German’s leader, IMF leader …..)

Man who whistles

While waiting for my next appointment, I heard a man whistle.

He carried a tune while being oblivious to outsiders. Maybe he just try to pass the time in between classes.

Maybe we should whistle too. We are all passing the time.

Some of us are doing time.

Stephen Hawking wishes he could hear his own voice.

The world-renown scientist himself needs help from technology.

We invented musical instruments: flute, drum, vuvuzela etc… to carry the sound, and use microphones to amplify it.

An I-Pad screen can now be used as a karaoke screen.

Music stand should now be reshaped to mount I-pads. It would then be called the I-stand.

I stand and sing from an I-stand.

Neil Young got inspired by looking at an old man on the farm “Old man looks at my life…”

The old farmer was just content going about his farming business (perspiration) while Young found inspiration.

Now, it’s Neil’s turn to grow old.

“I have been to Redwood, I have been to Hollywood…looking for a heart of gold and I am growing old” (at 66, he just released a new album).

So it is Christmas, what have you done?

We “use” artists when we need them: late at night, at year-end celebration and in-between classes.

Then we junk the 8-tracks, cassettes, CD‘s, or give them to Goodwill.

Then we move on to YouTube.

I will thank them on all of our behalf then.

Where would we be if not for the Abba who put “Happy New Year” on the musical map!

Music itself evolves with time. Just ask our faculty man who whistles the lonely tune.

By hearing his own tune, he perhaps feels less lonely, because the environment sends feedback with analog precision.

Man and music: both need each other to be complete. No wonder Tina Turner does it differently every time she sings her signature “Proud Mary“. Audience participation does make a difference: their feedback (while on their feet dancing) helps spin her interpretation of the song.

I know during that school break, with me there waiting for my appointment, the man who whistles was probably aware there were more than one person in that lounge. His energy certainly was boosted because his lonely sound impacted beyond the lonely walls of his own soul. Happy is he who wakes up to the sound of music.

The extraordinary of daily life

If you look hard enough, you will find them: a Queen wearing Green, a show host wearing “color purple”, bidding farewell to a dream career a black, single mom couldn’t have imagined 50 years ago, or a fairy tale went awry with California Dreamer, bodybuilder that pumped more tragedy to the Kennedy clan than pumping iron.

Reports about the tsunami clean-up in Japan (10 years at least), and financial tsunami are still trickling in(bottle-necked at foreclosure proceedings.) For personal “escape”, I picked up “Last Men Out”, true story of the last Marines out of Vietnam (embassy guards). Their last day was “le jour le plus long” of my generation. ie. tragedy which brought out the best and worst in human being.

It’s ironic that they couldn’t junk helicopters fast enough to clear the aircraft carrier’s deck, while just a few years later, during the Iranian hostage crisis, the team was short of just one to pull it off.

Pundits and philosophers have pondered about outliers: how gene pool could produce extraordinary out of the hurdled mass: a Van Gogh here, an Elton John there.

All I know is that Sir John thought highly of Lady Gaga. And she of Farmville. There must be a trend worth- noticing for game developers. First generation gaming was mostly about kill-or-be-killed. Maybe gaming 2.0 will help players discover the extraordinary in the ordinary: planting tomatoes, milking a cow… For two generations now, kids (in a less-than-3-percent-agriculture environment) have grown up not knowing where milk came from.

We went to the store, and brought home a flat screen TV. From there, our real life turns to just “being there”: mummified and dumbed down. This came from a horse’s mouth, Mary Hart “we do, we do want to know what’s going on with celebrities, the high-profile ones”.

OK, so Kardashian lost a few pounds. That’s great. But Oprah didn’t stop there. She went on to build a media empire, so huge that the O in ChicagO might as well be capitalized. Now, that’s extraordinary!

It triggers the imagination. It inspires and motivates us. Perhaps we, single mom or stay-at-home dad, can rise to touch the face of God after all. If Stephen Hawking is right (that we are like computers), then let’s boot it up, I-pad as launching pad. Still, I believe the extra-ordinary in daily life.