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Weekly Meanderings, 24 November 2018

Weekly Meanderings, 24 November 2018

Last updated on: November 24, 2018 at 6:40 am by Scot McKnight

Weekly Meanderings, 24 November 2018 2018-11-24T06:40:57-06:00 Scot McKnight

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Looking for a free home? (Might involve a move or at least a very long commute!)

Wannabe homeowners in Japan are about to get the deal of a lifetime.

The Japanese government is launching a program to reduce the number of abandoned homes across the country by offering them for sale for nearly nothing, or actually nothing, according to Insider. According to a 2013 report, there are about eight million houses that have been left abandoned all over Japan.

Natural disasters and an aging population tend to be the main reasons why many of these homes have been left empty for so many years. But, according to Insider, a consistent superstition about old homes or homes where people died violent or unnatural deaths being considered bad luck can also make real estate difficult to sell.

In addition to some of the free homes listed, the government may also be offering funds to renovate the properties, especially in instances where they were abandoned and left in disrepair.

According to the Japan Times, 70 percent of people in Tokyo live in apartments. While these abandoned homes may be primarily a rural problem, many of them have been popping up in suburbs and close to cities as well, making them potentially viable options for people who are sick of cramped urban living.

In addition, the Nomura Research Institute (NRI) predicts that the number of abandoned homes could rise to 21.7 million by 2033, nearly one third of all homes in the country, according to the Japan Times.

“If this continues, at some point it may be necessary to consider limiting new construction. But that would have a substantial impact on the economy,” said Wataru Sakakibara, a senior consultant at NRI, to the Japan Times.

Restaurant for introverts:

Japanese chain restaurant Ichiran Ramen first made a splash in the States when its first American location opened in Brooklyn‘s hip Bushwick neighborhood in 2016, and long lines of eager eaters ensued. But what the chain’s known best for is its unique dining setup.

Guests are not only encouraged to eat alone — dining solo is required and enforced by Ichiran’s interior design. A long line of private cubbies (referred to by the brand as “flavor concentration booths”) is backed by the restaurant’s galley kitchen, from which invisible chefs deliver steaming bowls of soup through drawn bamboo curtains. All diners have to do is savor Ichiran’s signature tonkotsu (pork-based) ramen with no distractions — or human interaction. And if you’re alone, that’s not much to ask.

Upon arrival at Ichiran, you’ll probably have to wait on line. Choose your soup at the vending machine, where visitors turn their orders into tiny tickets and pay. Simply enter your money into the machine, push the photo buttons that correspond with your order, take your tickets and push the flashing button below to receive your change.

Ichiran’s menu includes just one type of soup — tonkotsu — and that comes topped with the chain’s homemade noodles, green or white onions and sliced pork. At the machine, extra portions of these toppings are available, plus others like a soft-boiled salted egg, a refill of noodles (to be delivered half-way through the meal), white rice, dried seaweed, extra garlic and kikurage mushrooms. Tea and beer are also ordered here — the restaurant’s “carefully selected” water (said to be “delicate and soft on the stomach and liver”) is provided later at no charge.

Iceland rocks Christmas:

Icelanders have a beautiful tradition of giving books to each other on Christmas Eve and then spending the night reading. This custom is so deeply ingrained in the culture that it is the reason for the Jolabokaflod, or “Christmas Book Flood,” when the majority of books in Iceland are sold between September and December in preparation for Christmas giving.

At this time of year, most households receive an annual free book catalog of new publications called the Bokatidindi. Icelanders pore over the new releases and choose which ones they want to buy, fueling what Kristjan B. Jonasson, president of the Iceland Publishers Association, describes as “the backbone of the publishing industry.”…

The small Nordic island, with a population of only 329,000 people, is extraordinarily literary. They love to read and write. According to a BBC article, “The country has more writers, more books published and more books read, per head, than anywhere else in the world… One in 10 Icelanders will publish [a book].”…

When I asked an Icelandic friend what she thought of this tradition, she was surprised.

“I hadn’t thought of this as a special Icelandic tradition. It is true that a book is always considered a nice gift. Yes, for my family this is true. We are very proud of our authors.” …

Ryan Boyd:

Here is the bad news: since the 1980s, American elites have engineered environments that produce the opposite of these feelings and motivations. Indeed, there is a good chance, especially if you are under 40, that the sentiments described above are thin on the ground. They might even be nonexistent, wiped out or never there in the first place.

This reality is central to John Warner’s urgent new book Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities. There is a crisis in how we teach young people, and for Warner this is especially salient in American writing classes. But it’s not the crisis you hear policymakers in Washington or your statehouse talk about, nor is it the sort of narrative that attracts New York Times columnists. The problem is not smartphone addiction, or oversensitive campus activists, or a lack of rigor on the part of professors who only care about their research, or unscrupulous teachers unions protecting bad apples, or millennials getting too many participation trophies, or helicopter parents, or whatever else bothers pundits at The Atlantic this week. It has, instead, a lot more to do with how we have tried to industrialize and centralize education since the Reagan era while simultaneously withdrawing the resources that allow teachers to create environments where students can thrive. A bad thing happened when the standardized test met the austerity budget coming down the road.

As you may gather from the title, Why They Can’t Write is about how we teach — or don’t teach — students how to write effectively, particularly at the threshold between late high school and early college. However, Warner nests his critique of American university education within a broader polemic against a nation that funnels trillions of dollars into imperial wars while letting things like health care and K–12 education decay at home. His angle is pedagogical, but he also underscores the political economy of higher education, which, like many job sectors, frequently relies on poorly paid, unsupported part-timers to teach, especially in first-year college classes. Students, meanwhile, attend high schools stripped of resources and universities whose funding models burden them with crushing debt. Often they are hungry: everyone in the United States should be ashamed that half of the college students who report being homeless also work 30 hours a week. Terminal capitalism has metastasized into the ivory tower.

Romaine Lettuce alert:

Romaine lettuce is unsafe to eat in any form, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday in a broad alert in response to a new outbreak of illnesses caused by a particularly dangerous type of E. coli contamination.

The CDC told consumers to throw away any romaine lettuce they may already have purchased. Restaurants should not serve it, stores should not sell it, and people should not buy it, no matter where or when the lettuce was grown. It doesn’t matter if it is chopped, whole head or part of a mix. All romaine should be avoided.

The CDC alert, issued just two days before Americans sit down for their Thanksgiving dinners, reported that 32 people in 11 states have become sick from eating contaminated romaine. Of those, 13 have been hospitalized, with one patient suffering from a form of kidney failure. The Public Health Agency of Canada has reported 18 people infected with the same strain of E. coli.

Plastic alert:

A dead whale that washed ashore in eastern Indonesia had a large lump of plastic waste in its stomach, including drinking cups and flip-flops, a park official said Tuesday, causing concern among environmentalists and government officials in one of the world’s largest plastic polluting countries.

Rescuers from Wakatobi National Park found the rotting carcass of the 9.5-metre-long sperm whale late Monday near the park in Southeast Sulawesi province after receiving a report from environmentalists that villagers had surrounded the dead whale and were beginning to butcher the remains, park chief Heri Santoso said.

Santoso said researchers from wildlife conservation group WWF and the park’s conservation academy found about 5.9 kilograms of plastic waste in the animal’s stomach containing 115 plastic cups, four plastic bottles, 25 plastic bags, 2 flip-flops, a nylon sack and more than 1,000 other assorted pieces of plastic.

“Although we have not been able to deduce the cause of death, the facts that we see are truly awful,” said Dwi Suprapti, a marine species conservation co-ordinator at WWF Indonesia.

She said it was not possible to determine whether the plastic had caused the whale’s death because of the animal’s advanced state of decay.

Indonesia, an archipelago of 260 million people, is the world’s second-largest plastic polluter after China, according to a study published in the journal Science in January. It produces 2.9 million tonnes of mismanaged plastic waste a year, of which 1.17 million tonnes ends up in the ocean, the study said. [HT: LNMM]

Ten traits of a healthy person:

On a more granular level, psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman, PhD, names 10 specific personality traits in Scientific American:

Openness to feelings

Straightforwardness (and being “frank, sincere, and ingenuous”)

Competence

Warmth (being affectionate and friendly)

Positive emotions (experiencing “joy, happiness, love, and excitement”)

Low levels of angry hostility

Low anxiety (not being “shy, fearful, nervous, tensed, and restless”)

Low depression

Low vulnerability to stress

Low impulsivity (being able to control cravings and urges)

You don’t have to have all those personality traits to have a healthy life, Dr. Kaufman is quick to point out, but rather “the key determination [for psychological health] is the extent to which low scores on this profile block you from reaching your personal goals.” (To see where you fall on the scale, you can take an online test created by Dr. Kaufman.)

In two additional studies, the researchers compared these trait profiles to over 3,000 real students, and found that the traits were associated with greater life satisfaction, more self-esteem, self-sufficiency, being more optimistic, having less anger and aggression, and having more self-control. Because having anxiety, depression, and stress play a big role in keeping you from achieving all of those things, there’s no better time than now to make sure your mental health status isn’t what’s getting in the way of you living a long, happy life.

84 floor drop in an elevator. Yikes.

Firefighters had a pretty good idea of how they would rescue six people trapped in an elevator at the former John Hancock Center early Friday. But first, they had to find the elevator.

The not-so-express elevator was stuck somewhere between the 95th floor and the lobby of Chicago’s fourth-tallest building, one of several cables holding it having broken. It was in a “blind shaft” with no openings firefighters could use to inspect it or reach the trapped — among them tourists from Mexico who had taken it from the Signature Room shortly after midnight.

The passengers, not knowing which of the 95 floors they had landed on, would wait nearly three hours for the rescue.

Two of them were Northwestern University law students who had just ridden up to the Signature Lounge for the first time and were turned away because it was a few minutes past closing time. On the return trip, the elevator started going down faster than they were expecting, said one of the students, who didn’t want her name used for privacy reasons.

“It was really bumpy — it felt like a flight into Chicago,” she said.

… Strangers just seconds before, everyone on the elevator “started freaking out,” one of the law students said. Some people screamed. Some cried. Someone pressed the elevator’s emergency call button.

After about 45 minutes, when the Fire Department got involved, the students realized the solution was not going to be simple. Firefighters kept the group looped into their progress through the speaker.

“They couldn’t find us,” the student said. “We thought we only fell a few floors, but we ended up falling 84.”

Benjamin Conlon:

I started teaching in 2009. At that time, public school was very much the way I remembered it. That’s not the case anymore. Smartphones and social media have transformed students into creatures craving one thing: content. It’s a sad state of affairs.

But there’s hope.

Over the last few years, my students have become increasingly interested in stories from the days before smartphones and social media. In the same way many adults look back fondly on simpler times, kids look back to second and third grade, when no one had a phone. I think a lot of them already miss those days.

Smartphones and social media aren’t going anywhere. Both are powerful tools, with many benefits. But they have fundamentally altered how children interact with the world and not in a good way. We can change that. In addition to the “Wait Until 8th” pledge, consider taking the following steps to help your children reclaim childhood.

Propose that administrators and teachers stop using social media for school related purposes. In many districts teachers are encouraged to employ Twitter and Instagram for classroom updates. This is a bad thing. It normalizes the process of posting content without consent and teaches children that everything exciting is best viewed through a recording iPhone. It also reinforces the notion that ‘likes’ determine value. Rather than reading tweets from your child’s teacher, talk to your children each day. Ask what’s going on in school. They’ll appreciate it.

Insist that technology education include a unit on phone etiquette, the dark sides of social media and the long-term ramifications of posting online. Make sure students hear from individuals who have unwittingly and unwillingly been turned into viral videos.

Tell your children stories from your own childhood. Point out how few of them could have happened if smartphones had been around. Remind your children that they will some day grow up and want stories of their own. An afternoon spent online doesn’t make for very good one.

Teach your children that boredom is important. They should be bored. Leonardo Da Vinci was bored. So was Einstein. Boredom breeds creativity and new ideas and experiences. Cherish boredom.

Remind them that, as the saying goes, adventures don’t come calling like unexpected cousins. They have to be found. Tell them to go outside and explore the real world. Childhood is fleeting. It shouldn’t be spent staring at a screen.

Is there an evangelical “crack up”? Interesting interview.

R&P: What does the future hold for the Evangelical-Republican coalition? Is it cracking up?

PD: I can’t help but trot out a social science truism—it depends. The link of white evangelicals to the Republican Party appears stronger and more impregnable than ever. The combination of elected officials, evangelical elites, social networks, ideological purity, and legal and party organizations conspire to keep this productive relationship going. There is coming a time when several of those actors may realize they can no longer win elections with a base of white conservatives—as Robert Jones has argued—but until the engineer of this train decides to change tracks, it will continue forward.

At the same time, this conception of the coalition deeply challenges our conventional wisdom about religion. We once thought that certain religious and moral values would serve as limits to providing political support. For example, Bill Clinton may be presiding over a booming economy, but his moral failings were too great to support. None of that veneer remains intact; we can foresee almost no circumstances at this point that would intervene in the mutual love affair—the equally yoked relationship—between white evangelicals and Trump. But, that necessarily entails a crackup of evangelicalism. It may mean separating out political and religious evangelicalisms as Wuthnow suggests, but we could stop short of that choice and simply acknowledge that religion is no longer powerful enough to influence political behavior. Religion appears to be failing to exercise independent power on the decisions adherents make.

The introvert’s new tool:

LAS CRUCES, NM—Local church introvert Denny Patterson got dressed for church Sunday morning, grabbed his Bible, and slapped on his new “Do Not Greet” medical bracelet, a helpful visual reminder for other parishioners and members of the welcome team not to talk to him at all.

The man’s doctor recently instructed him to wear the medical bracelet in order for him to avoid potentially hazardous anxiety and social awkwardness.

One elderly woman attempted to come up and ask how he was feeling about the weather, but Patterson held up his hand, and she noticed the bracelet. She then simply gave him a polite nod and went on her way.

“This device is the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” Patterson told reporters via text message. “Now, I no longer have to worry about being mobbed in the middle of the church’s forced meet and greet time by people asking how my week was going. It’s a real lifesaver, and I mean that literally.”

Yikes, not nice enough evidently:

The priciest home in Southwest Florida is no more.

The 10,825-square-foot mansion at 2500 Gordon Drive in Naples sold earlier this year for $48.8 million. It is now a barren construction site.

Built in 1994, the six-bedroom, nine-bathroom mansion sat on 5.49 acres overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. Homes that previously sat on that plot had welcomed presidents and many other dignitaries over the past 81 years.

The beachfront Port Royal mansion sold June 20 after being listed for $60.9 million. Still, the sales price broke the record.

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