Thursday, January 25, 2007

96 tears

11 THINGS: 96 Tears

Thursday, January 25, 2007

1. Who? ? and the Mysterians. "The Mysterians" part of the band name is from a Japanese science fiction film from 1957. The "?" part is the lead singer's legal name. He also claims to be a Martian (and won't appear in public without his sunglasses).

2. What? "96 Tears" was the song that made the band darling one-hit wonders. A little bit garage, a little bit punk and a little bit Motown, it also brought a not-so-little bit of early Latino success in the pop music industry. Visit YouTube and query ?+and+ the+Mysterians and you might even detect a little bit of Prince in the early, early videos.

3. Where? The band was from Flint, Mich.

4. When? "96 Tears" reached No. 1 on the Billboard charts on Oct. 29, 1966. It's also No. 120 on Pitchfork's 200 Greatest Songs of the 1960s and No. 210 on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of all time.

5. How? The song was originally called "69 Tears," but the band's record label had them change it to avoid controversy.

6. No, no, how does the song go? "Too many teardrops/ for one heart to be cryin'/ Too many teardrops/ for one heart to carry on/ You're way on top now/ Since you left me/ You're always laughin'/ Way down at me" ... followed by a whole lot of cryin', a whole lot of tears, a whole lot of dancin' and well ... you get the picture.

7. What else? "96 Tears" has been covered by the Modern Lovers, Aretha Franklin, the Stranglers, Primal Scream and many others. The Cramps also reference the song in "Human Fly" ("Gravest Hits").

8. Why should I care? A little over two weeks ago, a fire destroyed ?'s home in Vienna Township, Mich. According to the Associated Press, the singer "lost 40 years worth of memorabilia including a gold record award and an organ believed to have belonged to Pink Floyd. Four Yorkshire terriers and a cockatoo also died in the blaze. ? didn't have insurance.

9. How is ? ? One has to admire ?'s optimism. He told AP: "No matter how tragic it is, if you know who you are and know what you have to offer, don't let these tragedies bring you down."

10. What's next? Benefit shows are being planned, including a performance by the band at Detroit's Winter Blast outdoor festival Feb. 9-11.

11. What can you do? To learn more, go to http://www.96tears.net/. The site has a video with ? describing the fire, photo links, donation options and a link to the band's MySpace site. You can also write to the band at: ? and the Mysterians, P.O. Box 96, Clio, MI 48420.

Tim Sullivan, tsullivan@sfchronicle.com

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inconvenient lies

Gore's 'Truth' given cold reception in Seattle Father gets schools to demand balance on global warming -

Blaine Harden, Washington Post

04:00 PST Federal Way, Wash. -- Frosty Hardison is neither impressed nor surprised that "An Inconvenient Truth," the global warming movie narrated by former Vice President Al Gore, received an Oscar nomination this week for best documentary.
"Liberal left is all over Hollywood," he grumbled after the nomination was announced.
Hardison, a parent of seven in the southern suburbs of Seattle, has himself roiled the global warming waters. It happened early this month, when he learned that one of his daughters would be watching "An Inconvenient Truth" in her seventh-grade science class.
"No you will not teach or show that propagandist Al Gore video to my child, blaming our nation -- the greatest nation ever to exist on this planet -- for global warming," Hardison wrote in an e-mail to the Federal Way School Board.
The 43-year-old computer consultant is an evangelical Christian who says he believes that a warming planet is "one of the signs" of Jesus Christ's imminent return for Judgment Day.
His angry e-mail, along with complaints from a few other parents, stopped the film from being shown to Hardison's daughter.
The teacher in the science class, Kay Walls, says that after Hardison's e-mail, she was told by her principal that she would receive a disciplinary letter for not following school board rules that require her to seek written permission to present "controversial" materials in class.
The e-mail also pressured the school board to impose a ban on screenings of the film for the district's 22,500 students.
The ban, which the school board says was merely a "moratorium," was lifted Tuesday night, subject to rigorous conditions. Still, the action has appalled the film's producers and triggered a ferocious national backlash.
Members of the school board say they have been bombarded by thousands of e-mails and phone calls, many of them hurtful and obscene, accusing them of scientific ignorance, pandering to religion, and imposing prior restraint on free speech.
It has been a terrible ordeal, school board member David Larson said during a long, emotional speech at the board meeting.
"I am here to foster healing in our community," he said, while noting with sadness that "civility and honest discourse are dying in our country."
What the school board had really intended to do, Larson and school board members insisted, was not to stop schools from teaching the science of global warming, but merely to follow long-standing school board rules that require students to be exposed to "other perspectives" when they view a film like "An Inconvenient Truth."
"We do not need to lose balance in order to save the Earth," Larson said.
Exactly what "balance" might amount to, however, was not spelled out.
The National Academy of Sciences, together with nearly all of the world's leading climate experts, have agreed that there is conclusive evidence that human activity is causing the Earth to warm and that there is an urgent need to reduce the amount of carbon being released into the air.
In public comments at the board meeting, several riled-up Federal Way residents argued that "An Inconvenient Truth" was, indeed, scientifically true and that saying otherwise is "deliberate obfuscation."
These residents derisively compared the search for "balance" in the global-warming issue to decades of phony claims by cigarette companies about the lack of "proof" that smoking is harmful to human health.
Before the board meeting started Tuesday night, several residents buttonholed Larson and asked him if there should be a "balanced" presentation of the Nazi Holocaust, because there are many who deny that it occurred.
"The Holocaust happened," Larson said. "We have evidence and photos. The difference between the Holocaust and the global warming is we don't have photos of what will happen 50 years from now."
Sitting in on this conversation was Walls, the seventh-grade science teacher whose class includes Frosty Hardison's daughter.
"We do have photos of snow melting off Kilimanjaro," Walls said, hopefully.
In the end, though, the board opted for an abundance of balance.
That means that "An Inconvenient Truth" may be shown only with the written permission of a principal -- and only when it is balanced by alternative views that are approved by both a principal and the superintendent of schools.
Hardison was pleased.
"I am happy they are giving the kids as much information as possible," he said.
His daughter's science teacher, meanwhile, said she is struggling to find authoritative articles to counter the information in the Gore documentary.
"The only thing I have found so far is an article in Newsweek called 'The Cooling World,' " Walls said.
It was written 32 years ago.
Page A - 6 URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/01/26/MNGVLNPGM61.DTL

Thursday, January 18, 2007

they lived to be 96

11 THINGS: They lived to be 96

Thursday, January 18, 2007

1. Momofuku Ando: Instant Ramen inventor and founder of the Nissin Food Products Co. (producers of Top Ramen and Cup Noodles). He gets the gold medal for cool cool names.

2. Katharine Hepburn: The four-time Academy Award winner was to film what J.D. Salinger once was to literature: fiercely independent and never not interesting.

3. Fay Wray: So well-known for playing Ann Darrow in the 1933 version of "King Kong" that when she died, the Empire State Building went dark for 15 minutes to honor her. She gets the silver medal for cool cool names.

4. Sir John Gielgud: Known primarily for his many Shakespearean roles (on stage and screen), the British actor also had memorable film roles in "Gandhi," "Chariots of Fire" and "Arthur."

5. Alfred Eisenstaedt: He's best remembered for his photo of an American sailor kissing a woman in the middle of Times Square on V-J Day; his last photographs were of President Clinton with wife Hillary and daughter Chelsea in August 1993.

6. Simon Wiesenthal: Famed concentration camp survivor, Nazi hunter and founder of the Jewish Documentation Centre in Vienna. The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles is named in his honor.

7. Jane Wyatt: The mother on "Father Knows Best" and mother of Mr. Spock in one of the original "Star Trek" episodes, she also played the wife of Dr. Daniel Auschlander in the underappreciated '80s medical drama "St. Elsewhere."

8. Mildred Benson: The original author of the Nancy Drew mystery books, under the pen name Carolyn Keene.

9. Vyacheslav Molotov: The Soviet foreign minister under Joseph Stalin was also the "Molotov" in Molotov cocktail. Vyacheslav gets the bronze medal for cool cool names.

10. Stanley Marcus: The son of Neiman Marcus founder Herbert Marcus Sr. is also the person credited with making the department store a household name. Neiman Marcus celebrates its 100-year anniversary in September.

11. King Ramses II: Known as Ramses the Great, the son of Seti I and Queen Tuya had 200 wives and concubines, 96 sons, 60 daughters (and one insane grocery bill). Various sources indicate he lived to be 92, 93, 94, 98, 99 and 100. Take the average of all those numbers and what do you get? That's right ... 96.

Tim Sullivan, tsullivan@sfchronicle.com

Page G - 3
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/01/18/NSGANNIVV21.DTL

momofuku ando

ASIAN POP
Forever and Ever, Ramen

- By Jeff Yang, Special to SF Gate

In memory of the late instant-noodle king, Momofuku Ando, Jeff Yang speaks to notable ramen authorities about the meal-in-a-bowl's awesome cultural impact -- including Robert Allan Ackerman, director of the forthcoming Brittany Murphy film "The Ramen Girl."

Over the past half-century, Japan has built its reputation as a mother lode of innovation, brick by silicon-grooved brick. Nanoscopic consumer electronics. Friendly household robots. Cars that get 100 miles per gallon, with digital surround-sound systems and in-seat butt massagers.

But ask the residents of Japan about their greatest contribution to the world, and they're nearly united in their response. According to a turn-of-the-millennium poll by Fuji Research Institute, it's not the compact disc -- that came in fifth. It's not the Sony Walkman -- that was No. 3. No, Japan's most significant gift to mankind, said poll respondents, was also one of its most humble: that thrifty, tasty snack treat, instant ramen. (Karaoke, in case you wondered, came in second.)

Absurd though it may seem, the poll's respondents have got a point. Let's look at the numbers: Over the entire span of its existence, the Walkman sold just 350 million-with-an-m units. In 2004, about 17 billion CDs and DVDs were sold around the globe, including blank media. But that same year, the world gulped down over 70 billion servings of instant ramen. And though the Walkman is gone and CD sales continue to tail off, instant ramen sales just keeping on bowling along: In 2006, worldwide consumption hit a record 85 billion packages, and has 100 billion square in its gunsights by 2010. These are sums that stagger the imagination, and which certainly represent something of an ultimate vindication for the snack treat's late inventor, ramentrepreneur Momofuku Ando.

Ando, who was slurped into the eager gullet of heaven Jan. 5 at the well-preserved age of 96, was moved to create instant noodles in 1958 as he watched how legions of his hungry compatriots lined up for bowls of steaming ramen despite the rampant poverty of postwar Japan. After a few failed attempts, Ando developed a flash-frying technique that evaporated the moisture content of parboiled noodles, transforming them into uniform bricks of preserved carbohydrate. Unfortunately, the process was not, at that time, cheap -- leading to the unusual circumstance of instant ramen being a luxury product in a time of dramatic recession, available only to those who could pay extra for the privilege.

Of course, time and automation have transformed instant ramen into the ultimate subsistence fare -- with prices as low as six packages for $1 common in supermarkets across the nation. Both despite and because of this, instant ramen connoisseurs are surprisingly legion: For these peripatetic potboilers, ramen isn't just a belly-filler, it's a meal worth savoring -- a five-minute express ticket to noodle nirvana.

Rah Rah Ramen

The ranks of ramenthusiasts might well begin with Seattle-based architect-musician Ron Konzak, who literally wrote the book on instant ramen, a short but tasty tome called, naturally, "The Book of Ramen," which gathers together notable ramen factoids (the average pack of ramen has 100 individual strands, each about 16 inches long) and recipes created and compiled by Konzak and his wife Mickey. His second wife: "I actually first got into ramen after my first wife and I divorced," says Konzak. "I was living by myself, and I didn't have a heck of a lot of time, but we all have to eat."

Konzak had spent time in Japan after the war and encountered the traditional variety of ramen then. When the instant stuff arrived in local supermarkets, he bought it by the carton and lived on it for months as he built his own house. "It was boil water, make noodles, eat, get back to work," he says. "And finally I got a little tired of eating the plain noodles, so I started making it in different ways -- adding this and that, using the dried noodles as an ingredient for other dishes." Like spanakoramen, an instant-noodle variant on the Greek phyllo-and-feta pastry. And ramen rarebit. "And don't forget ramelets," he says. "Great for breakfast."

Konzak's recipe collection grew and grew. When he met Mickey, she urged him to put them out for the world to share. The book's first printing was a modest 10,000 copies. They're now on their third run back to the presses -- meeting the demands of stressed professionals, divorcés and, especially, college students. "That's more than 90 percent of our readership!" he laughs. "I don't know how many times I get e-mails from people saying, 'I'm so happy you wrote this book, I'm getting it for my son in college.'"

Ramen and wonking out go together. It's the perfect dorm-room treat, cookable with nothing more than a coffee maker or hot-water heater, fast and just about free. PCs have "Intel Inside" stickers; the programmers sitting in front of them should sport "Ramen Inside" tattoos.

Ramen.com

Given instant ramen's staple-meal status on campus and among the digerati, it's probably not surprising that a healthy ecosystem of ramenbloggers has developed, cataloging the many hundreds of varieties available, reviewing brands by the bowl and packet and sharing breaking ramenews as it hits the wires. (The passing of Mr. Ando, the Godfather of Bowl, was a seismic shock to the ramenblogger community, as you can imagine.)

Perhaps the most prominent of these net noodlers is Orange County resident Ed Wu, the proprietor of ramenramenramen.net, notable not only for its relative longevity as far as single-subject blogs go (he's been obssessing over ramen on the Web for going on two years now) but also because Wu has, through his connections, become the sole source for prized "Ramen Bowl" pins -- a sexy way of wearing your ramen-love on your sleeve, or at least on your lapel.

Wu's love of instant ramen is at least in part nostalgic. "I was born in Taiwan and came here at age 7," he says. "And I remember being terribly homesick when I first moved here, away from our friends and relatives." Hot bowls of instant ramen doubled as both therapeutic regimen and budget-friendly fare for him and his sister. "Both my parents worked, and we weren't well off -- and about the only thing I could do as a 7-year-old was boil water, so as kids we ate a lot of Maruchan Beef Flavor," he says. "And I actually really enjoyed it. I ate instant ramen every chance I got."

Wu's ramen jones followed him through high school, into college -- where he studied abroad in Japan -- and then into adulthood, as he joined his parents' company and began traveling to Asia on business. "When I go to Japan with my dad, it drives him crazy because all I ever want to eat is ramen," he says. "He says to me, 'There are so many nice restaurants we can go to, and you want to eat this?' But there's no comparison. I just think it's the most amazing food in the world."

It goes without saying that when Wu got married three years ago, it was to a woman who accepted and even embraced his ramenia. "Alice also enjoys ramen -- I probably couldn't be married to anyone who didn't!" laughs Wu. "We'd go on ramen dates to this place about 20 minutes away from us -- we still go there just about every weekend. And she was so cool and down-to-earth about it. She never looked at it as being a cheap date, but rather, a way for me to share something I'm passionate about with her."

In fact, it was Alice who first encouraged him to start blogging about ramen ... after they got back from their ramen honeymoon in Japan. "We went to the ramen museum in Yokohama!" he says. "Alice was a good sport about it -- she thought it would be fun. And it was crazy: We went on a weekday, late in the afternoon, and we still had to wait for almost an hour to get into any of the restaurants in the museum. I only got to have one bowl ... but it was a big bowl. And that's still a highlight of my trip -- biting into a piece of pork that literally melted in my mouth. Such an incredible experience."

The Wus also loaded up at the museum store, buying as many packages of instant ramen as they could fit into their luggage -- "Not nearly as much as I would have liked" -- and bringing it home with them. That began Wu's personal quest to collect and sample as wide a variety of instant ramen brands as he could, and ultimately, at Alice's urging, to document his ramencounters online. He now has an audience of thousands of fellow ramen-lovers per week -- and ever since Ando's passing, swarms of journalists pestering him for his ramenological insights. (For the record, Wu is painstaking about following package directions exactly as written. His preferred flavor is shoyu, and his current brand of choice -- as blasphemous as this may seem -- is a Chinese brand called Tong-Yi. "But the concept of instant noodles is originally Chinese," he points out. "And Ando is ethnically Chinese himself, from Taiwan!" So OK then.)

But the pot's just beginning to boil for ramenophiles everywhere. Later this year, a film is coming that promises to expand the Ramen Empire into Hollywood and onto movie marquees across middle America.

That's Ramentertainment

The film in question is "The Ramen Girl," starring "8 Mile"'s Brittany Murphy as a young American woman who travels to Japan to be with her boyfriend, gets summarily dumped and decides, spontaneously, to apprentice herself to a stoic noodle master, played by beloved Japanese thespian Toshiyuki Nishida. It's been dubbed a "romantic comedy," a mislabeling that irritates director-producer Robert Allan Ackerman. (Although Ackerman should be used to mislabeling: He directed the made-for-TV biopic "The Reagans," which conservative pundits and bloggers soundly and wrongly hounded into deletion.)

"I have no idea how that characterization happened, and it bugs me," says Ackerman. "There're a lot of very funny scenes in this movie, and there's a romantic subplot to this movie, a love story between Brittany's character and a Korean Japanese guy -- he's Japanese, but his ancestry is Korean, so in a sense, he's as alienated in Japan as much as an American might be, and discriminated against in many ways. But I wouldn't call this film a romantic comedy" -- which is to say, don't expect any "Sleepless in Shibuya"-style meet-cute claptrap.

Ackerman also bristles at early comparisons to films like "Tampopo" and "Lost in Translation." "'Tampopo' is about learning to cook noodles, or part of it is, and 'Lost in Translation' is about Americans in Japan, but beyond that, this is much more of personal story, about somebody coming of age, finding out who they are, and having to go to a completely different culture to do so," he says. "And while I like 'Lost in Translation,' I do think our film is a lot more respectful of Japanese culture. In 'Lost,' Japan became just a stand-in for a strange, foreign place. It could have taken place anywhere."

"Ramen Girl," on the other hand, is deeply immersed in Japaneseness, with a crew, production team and cast that is almost entirely Japanese. Ackerman himself has spent a good part of the past 15 years directing theater in Japan, which gave him access to some of the nation's most promising and prominent talent. It also gave him a deep sense of the dichotomies between Japan and the United States -- and within Japan itself, the quintessential Old-New World.

"Working with young Japanese artists, what really has struck me is how they're all struggling to get better, not struggling to get famous," he says. "On Broadway, you do a casting call, and as soon as someone gets a part, they're on the phone to their agents, looking for the next one. It's not that they're not serious about their art ... it's that they're so serious about their careers. Here, you really see this commitment to the work -- even if it's a small role or a small production. It's about making you better at who and what you are. And that's something we explore in the movie. It's about dedication, discipline, commitment, even if you don't know what's on the other side. It's about the nature of art."

The scene that Ackerman is currently editing is an example of that art-versus-commodity dichotomy. "It's this scene where Yoshida's character, the master chef, is explaining what a bowl of ramen is," he says. "How it contains all the different elements of the world -- earth and sea -- and the soup is the soul, the thing that holds it all together. And she doesn't understand a thing. She can't understand Japanese, he speaks no English. But it's more than that. He's saying 'observe the bowl.' She, being American, wants to do something, she wants to act. It's a disconnect."

There's a soulfulness to ramen, that comes in part from the traditions upheld by the family-owned shops that still thrive throughout the nation.

"You go to these places, and there's a soup bowl that contains the remnants of spices that could be hundreds of years old," he says. "They never, never clean it. Spices are just added to this bowl. And so it contains the residue of their grandfather's ingredients, and that's the most secret part of it. That's something I find incredibly profound. It's like owning Shakespeare's inkpot and knowing it was never washed. Some part of the ink you're using might have been on Shakespeare's pen. There's the weight and depth of history in each bowl of this soup."

This homeopathic connection to ancient days, this unbroken spiritual line, is part of what fuels the ritual associated with ramen at its most traditional. There is an art to its consumption as well. "There are people who only go to a specific ramen shop, on a specific day of the week, and wait in line for hours to get in," says Ackerman. "And some chefs are so strict that they don't allow any conversation. Customers eat in silence or get kicked out. And they close the shop as soon as the noodles are done -- they prepare 40 servings a day, and when it's gone, they won't make any more."

Is there anything at all similar to this phenomenon in America? "I think the only thing that comes close is barbecue, perhaps -- the regional variation, the way people carry on about different rubs and sauces," he says. "The way some people spend their entire lives trying to perfect a single recipe." (One can imagine a sequel called "The Grill Girl," about a Japanese expat searching for self-actualization in the spice rubs and smokers of America.)

But if traditional ramen is like grandpa's old-school, hand-smoked 'cue, instant ramen is, well, the McRib. And both are emblematic of Japan today, in all of its schizophrenic splendor. America, too: For every worshipper at the altar of char-grilled authenticity, there's a cultist who craves (and celebrates, in prose and poetry) the wonders of Mickey D's mutant variation on the theme. But that's the brilliance of today's magnificently mixed-up cultural reality. We live in a time where haute and basse don't just co-exist -- they converse, conmingle, get sexy together.

Like ramen itself, popular culture today is a blend of all the elements of the world, held together by a soulful soup of human interaction. It simultaneously embraces both the resonant residue of the ancients and the piping-hot spontaneity of Nissin's globally successful product.

And even as I write this ... somehow, I get the feeling Momofuku Ando is smiling.
Ramen Recipes from "The Book of Ramen"
courtesy of Ron Konzak

Ramburger

Vegetarians love this one. With a little bit of imagination this can taste just like a hamburger. Serve it on a bun with ketchup, dill pickle and fried onions.

1 pkg. ramen noodles
1 egg
1/4 cup onion, chopped
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
1 tbsp. flour
1 tbsp. oil
1 flavor packet
1/2 tsp. poultry seasoning
1 tbsp. steak or Worcestershire sauce
black pepper to taste

Knead unopened package of ramen noodles until broken up real fine. Boil noodles in 2 cups of water for 5 minutes. When noodles are done, drain and rinse with cold water and let drain for a few minutes to make it as dry as possible.

Chop onions and nuts finely and saute in an iron skillet. While frying, add black pepper and poultry seasoning.

In a bowl, mix together egg, flour, steak or Worcestershire sauce and contents of flavor packet. Add drained noodles, sauteed ingredients and mix well again.

Cook in an oiled skillet on medium heat until browned, then turn over and brown other side. Use a cover on the skillet to get them to cook evenly. The mixture can be shaped neatly into individual patties before they firm up.

Rambalaya

Yes, it's true. This is a ramen version of Jambalaya. Don't laugh, it tastes just great! You can also add cooked chicken, smoked ham, spicy sausage and shrimp.

1 pkg. ramen noodles
1 small green pepper
2 pimentos, canned
or
1 small sweet red pepper
1 small onion
1 cup mushrooms, large pieces
1 stalk celery, thinly sliced
1 tbsp. oil
1/2 tsp. paprika
1 tbsp. butter

Pre-heat oven to 300 degrees Fahrenheit. Knead unopened package of ramen until broken up medium.

In a small saucepan, boil noodles in 2 cups of water for five minutes.When noodles are done, put into a strainer, rinse with cold water and let drain for a few minutes, shaking the water out to make them as dry as possible.

Saute together mushrooms, onions, peppers and celery. If you feel brave, add your favorite hot chili pepper.

Mix all the ingredients together in a greased baking dish. Bake covered at 300 degrees Fahrenheit for one hour.

Serve with corn bread and salad. Also makes a nice side dish to shrimp or crayfish.

Jeff Yang forecasts new Asian and Asian American consumer trends for the market-research company Iconoculture (www.iconoculture.com). He is the author of "Once Upon a Time in China: A Guide to the Cinemas of Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China" (Atria Books) and co-author of "I Am Jackie Chan: My Life in Action" (Ballantine) and "Eastern Standard Time" (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin). He lives in New York City. Go to www.ouatic.com/mojomail/mojo.pl to join Jeff Yang's biweekly mailing list offering updates on this column and alerts about other breaking Asian and Asian American pop-culture news.

URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/g/a/2007/01/18/apop.DTL

Thursday, January 11, 2007

please don't comment ... until later ....

Put Off Reading This Until Tax Time
- By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer

(01-11) 19:39 PST WASHINGTON, (AP) --

Procrastination in society is getting worse and scientists are finally getting around to figuring out how and why. Too many tempting diversions are to blame, but more on that later.

After 10 years of research on a project that was only supposed to take five years, a Canadian industrial psychologist found in a giant study that not only is procrastination on the rise, it makes people poorer, fatter and unhappier.

Something has to be done about it, sooner rather than later, University of Calgary professor Piers Steel concludes. His 30-page study is in this month's peer-reviewed Psychological Bulletin, published by the American Psychological Association.

In 1978, only about 5 percent of the American public thought of themselves as chronic procrastinators. Now it's 26 percent, Steel said.

And why not? There are so many fun ways to kill time — TVs in every room, online video, Web-surfing, cell phones, video games, iPods and Blackberries.

At work, e-mail, the Internet and games are just a click away, making procrastination effortless, Steel said.

"That stupid game Minesweeper — that probably has cost billions of dollars for the whole society," he said.

The U.S. gross national product would probably rise by $50 billion if the icon and sound that notifies people of new e-mail suddenly disappear, he added.

And there's good reason to worry right now about the problem of procrastination.

"People who procrastinate tend to be less healthy, less wealthy and less happy," Steel said Wednesday. "You can reduce it, but I don't think you can eliminate it."

Psychologist William Knaus, who has written several self-help books on fighting procrastination since 1977's "Overcoming Procrastination," said Steel is "absolutely right."

He said he found it harder to wean chronic procrastinators from the habit of delaying than to wean alcoholics from booze. Knaus mentioned one businessman who spent 40 hours of delay time to avoid five minutes of work.

"It's a huge problem," Knaus said. "I think the majority of mental disabilities people have — anxiety, panic — they can be defined as a special case of procrastination."

There is personal financial fallout from procrastination, too. Delay in filing taxes on average costs a person $400 a year and last-minute Christmas shopping with credit cards was five times higher in 1999 than in 1991, Steel found in a review of more than 500 economic and psychological studies about putting off unpleasant chores.

Steel's study found that in the past quarter century, the average self-score for procrastination (using a 1-to-5 scale with 1 being no delaying) has increased by 39 percent.

Overall, more than a quarter of Americans say they procrastinate. Men are worse than women (about 54 out of 100 chronic procrastinators are men) and the young are more like to procrastinate than the old, Steel said. Three out of four college students consider themselves procrastinators.

Early studies looking at U.S. and Canadian cultures didn't find any differences in the two countries' procrastination problem, but Steel said when he has more time he'll get around to more cross-cultural studies.

The causes of procrastination combine temptation, sense of immediacy, the value of doing the job, and whether you believe you can get the work done, Steel found. He even created a complicated mathematical formula, complete with Greek letters, to figure out when a person is likely to procrastinate.

Temptation is the biggest factor. And it's why procrastination is getting worse, Steel said, citing technology.

"It's easier to procrastinate now than ever before. We have so many more temptations," he said. "It's never been harder to be self-disciplined in all of history than it is now."

But procrastination goes back thousands of years, before technology. Ancient literature harps on the problem, Steel said. Knaus mentioned a book from 1852: "Thoughtless Little Fanny: The Unhappy Results of Procrastination." The author is just called "a friend of children."

While many self-help books say perfectionists procrastinate because they don't want to get things wrong, Steel found just the opposite. Perfectionists procrastinate less and do better because they avoid delaying. However they do worry more about putting stuff off, he said.

Studying procrastination as a field has a benefit, said the professor. The more he knows about the problem and the causes, the less he procrastinates — even though he sheepishly acknowledges his study was completed five years late.

The good thing about studying procrastination, he said: "If you take a day off from it, you can always say it's field research."
___

Ways to procrastinate on the Net:

Steel's Web site, including two online tests:

Procrastination Research Group at Carleton University in Ottawa:

Overcoming Procrastination tips from the State University of New York at Buffalo:

www.procrastinus.com

http-server.carleton.ca/tpychyl/

ub-counseling.buffalo.edu/stressprocrast.shtml

URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2007/01/11/national/a120550S02.DTL

martin luther king, jr.

11 Things: Martin Luther King Jr.

Thursday, January 11, 2007

1. On society: "The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined non-conformists who are dedicated to justice, peace and brotherhood." Strength to Love, 1963.

2. On law: "I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law." Letter From Birmingham Jail, 4/16/63.

3. On righteousness: "I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant." Accepting Nobel Peace Prize, 12/10/64.

4. On understanding: "Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will." Letter From Birmingham Jail, 4/16/63.

5. On ignorance: "Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." Strength to Love, 1963.

6. On salvation: "Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted." Strength to Love, 1963.

7. On riots: "A riot is the language of the unheard." Address given in Birmingham, Ala., 12/31/63.

8. On injustice: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Letter from Birmingham Jail, 4/16/63.

9. On success: "Success, recognition and conformity are the bywords of the modern world where everyone seems to crave the anesthetizing security of being identified with the majority." Strength to Love, 1963.

10. On life: "If a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live." Speech in Detroit, 6/23/63.

11. On silence: "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., 1/15/29-4/4/68.

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URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/01/11/NSGM9NDRU01.DTL

Saturday, January 06, 2007

a summary of current events

US Army urges dead to re-enlist

The US Army is to apologise to the families of officers killed or wounded in action who were sent letters urging them to return to active duty.
The letters were sent to more than 5,100 Army officers listed as recently having left the military.

But this figure included about 75 officers killed in action and about 200 wounded in action.

More than 3,000 members of the US military have died in Iraq since the war began.

Casualties have also been suffered in Afghanistan since the US invasion.

"Army personnel officials are contacting those officers' families now to personally apologise for erroneously sending the letters," the army said in a statement.

It said the database normally used for such correspondence with former officers had been "thoroughly reviewed" to remove the names of dead and wounded soldiers.

"But an earlier list was used inadvertently for the December mailings," it added.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/6237607.stm

fletch

January 6, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
Mr. Ford Gets the Last Laugh
By CHEVY CHASE

IN recent days, I’ve been bombarded by requests to comment on my relationship with President Gerald Ford. Until now, I’ve tried to say nothing — any remarks from me during the Ford family’s private time of grief would have been inappropriate.

The requests were understandable, I guess. You see, I made a reputation for myself 30 years ago on “Saturday Night Live” in part because of a number of sketches and “Weekend Updates” that I wrote or appeared in ridiculing Mr. Ford for his apparent “stumble-bumbling” (though he was perhaps the best athlete to have been president) and making fun of his presidency.

Luckily for me, Mr. Ford had a sense of humor.

I’ve often thought how odd it was that we became linked together. It’s not like we had a lot in common. After all, Mr. Ford had never been helped for any problems with “self-medication” in a facility that has helped so many throughout these past decades. And he had never been castigated by the press for such atrocities as “Oh! Heavenly Dog” or “Cops and Robbersons,” among other slightly awful films I had made in Hollywood.

But linked together we were. And not just in the obvious ways. If it hadn’t been for the courage of Mr. Ford’s wife, Betty, for admitting to an alcohol problem, I would never have received the help I needed in the early 1980s at the Betty Ford clinic, located not far from the Ford residence near Palm Springs. During my short stay there, I often saw Mrs. Ford personally surveying the clinic and generously offering a helping hand to those who were lucky enough to face their problems and, with the learned help of the clinic staff, appraise their behavior and their lifestyles.

One day when my wife, Jayni, came to visit me at the clinic, the Fords invited us to lunch. As it happened, Mrs. Ford had become so beloved and respected by many for her earlier openness about breast cancer and her alcoholism that a television network was in preproduction on a special bio-pic about her. Mr. Ford suggested that while we ate lunch, the four of us could view the videotape of various performances by actors being considered to play the part of the president.

Seated at a small table set for four in a simple dining room also containing a somewhat complicated videotape recorder and TV set were the former commander in chief and I making friendly small talk before lunch was brought in. And on all fours, literally on their hands and knees in front of the bulky and confusing tape machine, were Mrs. Ford and Jayni trying their best to figure out the wiring of the playback machine and the way the whole system worked, so we could watch the screen tests. Noting the effort the ladies were putting into getting the VCR to work, I suggested to Mr. Ford that perhaps we might help them out.

As I began to stand up from my chair, he took gentle hold of my arm, sat me back down and said: “No, no, Chevy. Don’t even think about it. I’ll probably get electrocuted, and you’ll be picked up and arrested for murder.”

We both laughed.

I’ll never forget that moment. My laughter was hearty and genuine.

Chevy Chase is an actor and a writer.