First they kill the trees

There is the most awful arborcide going on in my community.  At first it was on the main road going past, and I sort of noticed it while walking the dog and wondered how it would impact on the noise from the road towards our little house.   The trees were all healthy and in good nick and I don't have a nice local councilor that I can email and ask what the heck is going on, but it wasn't right in my back yard. I sort of assumed they'd probably want to widen the road so that even more cars could be stuck in traffic every day - nope, no one ever learns that more roads means more traffic, not less.

I should have known this morning when getting out the shower I saw 2 huge trucks on the road outside.  I did take action. I didn't leave things to chance.  I went and asked what they were doing and they were removing a roadside tree they said.

So imagine my horror when I got home today and saw 2 trucks in my back garden covered head to toe in trees!  My trees.  From my garden.  Without permission, without notification, without redress, without a chance to protest, no time to tie myself to the tree.  I ranted, I raved.  I cussed I shouted.  But it was too late.  Gone.  Not dead, not rotten, not about to fall down.  Gone, cut to pieces.  And of course they won't be replaced.  Arbocide.  I'm sorry, it's a touchy, irrational thing with me. Oh they said, these trees fall down in the rainy season - right like they've fallen down every one of the 30 or so years that their rings say they were old.  Oh, but the ants were attacking their roots - well kill the f***ing ants I say, don't touch my trees.


 (By the way: Is there someone out there who can tell me how to add a bunch of photos to a blog using blogger.com without them jumping all over the place I just want to be able to line them up side by side and under each other without big gaps.)

eliminate free choice

I love serendipity.  There was a phase during the start of school when the library was new and the librarians were just desperately trying to get all and any books onto the shelves any old way.  Which meant there was a suspension of the dewey decimal system.  Yes sure it was on the spines of the books, but suddenly Nelson Mandela was next to Twilight, which shared a shelf with Learning chinese characters, the Warren Buffet way and Buffy.  The poor and desperate were surviving on less than a dollar a day next to the opulence of the golden age.  It was wonderful.

There is a lot of talk of how the internet creates and perpetuates intellectual silos - nothing new to what universities with their faculties do, or the very existence of selective education from preschool upwards.  It's a tough battle to put yourself in the oncoming path of divergent views.  And yet sometimes I just stumble on something while looking for something else that is just so much fun.  It's happened twice in fact in the last week, both times with books.

The first, leading to today's title, is "Never let go: A philosophy of lifting, living and learning" By Dan John - I challenge you to read the first chapter, it's a scream (free on Kindle).  He talks about why guys in prison have such buff bodies and puts it down to lack of free choice.  As research has shown, we only have so much willpower (aka free choice - this is a great article by the way) and if it's all been used up in the first few hours of the day by making all sorts of crappy decisions like when to get out of bed, whether to hit the snooze button one more time, using shampoo A or B,  what to wear, what to have for breakfast, whether to drink the coffee and eat the muffin or not, we use up all of our "can of free will" and there's nothing left by the time we have to do a work out or resist the cake in the office or the handful of chocolate at 4pm when the kids get home from school etc.
Suddenly you realize why Amy Chua's kids did so well.  Not because she's such a great mum, but because she made all the hard choices for them and totally eliminated their free will so that they could use up their "can" in a limited and highly effective way.  That's why too, when kids leave home for college they go off the rails.  Why when we get back from a spa retreat we go back to being slobs.   And of course we all know that the science of happiness teaches us that too much choice is not a great thing.

Oh, yes, please take away all my free will and I"ll be slim and trim and gorgeous with energy left to impose a lack of free will on my kids that makes them realize there is  no alternative to music practice and homework and team sports.  NO CHOICE - the new motto in this household.

The other book is slightly more scholarly, and WAY less funny, but thought provoking none the less "The Geography of Thought - how Asians and Westerners think differently and why" by Richard Nisbett. I can just see scholarly wars on the horizon as Messrs. Pinker etal. sharpen their verbal swords.

why dutch is more difficult than chinese

At least according to my linguist daughter.

As Sinterklaas and his merry band of Pieten are in town, yes, yes, yes, they arrived on Saturday in all their glory Dutch is in full flow in the household.  One of the advantages of living abroad, isolated by your children's contemporaries is that their sense of reality and belief is suspended just a tiny bit longer than if they'd been back 'home' and have it shattered by older and more cynical kids.

We went out on Saturday night, the first night of putting out the shoes with letters and poems and pictures and came home to the most wondrously composed letter, completely in Dutch.  Well, this must be a new way to get children to spontaneously learn a language!  We traced the drafts to next to the computer and realized that judicious use of google translate had been made.  But nevertheless they'd done very well.

Yesterday a big portion was given over to the next letter (this time with parents taking the function of google translate) and I congratulated them on their rapidly improving Dutch and asked if they found it easier than Chinese.

Not at all, says my daughter.  Chinese is way easier.  You don't have the same alphabet, so it's not so easy to confuse the same letters that sound differently and you don't have to learn to spell differently.

So there you have it.  Dutch is more difficult than Chinese.