Random
Well, the Yankees lost after coming back from 0-3 to tie it; a solo homer in the, oh, 6th or 7th by a Brewer took care of that. Man, they haven't been playing well. Oh well, they DID just come off a really good streak.
I was out driving just now, and there was this dead skunk completely flattened on the side of the road. I passed it twice because it was on one of my turn-around roads, and the first time I saw the glint of an eye right near this skunk. Turns out, as I found on the way back (it ran away when I flashed my highs on it the first time, but stuck around the second time), a fox was eating it, or at least checking it out. I'm betting on the eating, since it ran and returned when I was past. I didn't know foxes were carrion eaters... I figured it was just a skunk hovering around its dead mate. Do skunks do that? No clue, really; I know they're related to ferrets and are mustelids, but beyond that my experiences and knowledge are limited to the nasty fucking stench. Since the Lacey skunk episode, though, it doesn't bother me nearly so much, so I guess I came out ahead.
In case you're curious and don't know, a group of foxes is a skulk. I didn't know that, but it's a lot cooler than a gaggle (geese)... I wonder how people came up with these names, anyway. Well, I suppose they're descriptive, for the most part, of behavior or personification. A murder of crows, for example, or a wake of buzzards. I like the bullfinch collective, a 'bellowing' of bullfinches. Heh, a group of geese on water is a plump. A convocation of eagles? Very appropriate. Yep, I love the wiki.
I was thinking about how people used to tell me to try to learn one new thing every day. One? What the deuce kind of slacking is that? Assuming it is a realistic goal for most people, which I can't really believe, it would mean I'm very far removed from normal. And that, at least, is accurate. Sometimes I wonder what kind of psychoses I harbor, when you compare my mind to the 'normal' mind.
By the way, the collective for hedgehogs according to the wiki is a prickle.
Where are our Renaissance Men, our Polymaths? Where are the Leonardo da Vincis of our time? Are we placing more importance on excellence in specialty and ignoring those who are talented in many fields but not quite enough to stand out in such specialized fields, or do they frankly not exist? If the latter is true, why is that? Education system, lower expectations, culture, demography? I don't know, but my aspiration is to look back in forty years and see the life of a Renaissance Man. I look at our leaders in both the private and public sectors and see nobody who impresses me nearly as much as a da Vinci, Jefferson, or Aurelius.
Continuing from above, athletics is a good example of specialization. If you're good enough to get noticed on the world scene, as in at the Olympics or similar, you're probably not going to be much good for anything else. Notable exceptions are decathletes, but even then, they're typically not good enough in at least half of their events to have a competitive chance in the specialized competitions. You could say that a major contributor is the sheer quantity of people on the earth; there will always be a bell curve of any given ability, but when the population really gets up there, even the 99.9999th percentile is full of so many people that they're the only ones that have a shot.
The last thing I wish to be is a specialist. Continuing with the athletics example (sigh), I'll never be a great long distance runner. I'll never be a great sprinter. I'll never be able to bench 600 pounds or throw a discus 300 feet. I'll never be able to dunk a basketball or throw a 90 mph fastball, and I'll never swim the English Channel. But I can run farther than most people and still turn on the afterburners when I need to, I can handle more weight in real life applications than most people, and so on. I used to aspire to greatness in running, and I used to dream of playing baseball in college and moving up to the majors, or climbing Everest some day. But somewhere along the way I realized that a 185 pound 5'10" mesomorph with good natural athletic ability is a damn nice thing to be, because while I'll never be
great at any sport I can think of, I can be
good at all of them. And I'm happy with that--in all aspects of my life.
