Month: July 2017

Posted on

It’s the Rail Thing

It’s McTrue.

Quite a while back, I recounted the saga of Boaty McBoatface, the British polar research vessel that was christened by an internet poll (Awwww!) only to have the name rejected as frivolous by the Powers That Be (Booo!). The decision disappointed lovers of silliness and members of the media – or is there a distinction? – who had to settle for the minor victory of calling the craft “also known as…” in every relevant story and online posting from here until the Sun flames out.

But! There has been a new development!

We take you now to Stockholm, where Reuters reports that a Swedish railway operator has named one of its trains through a public poll. The train operator publicly embraced the new name, which is … yes, really … Trainy McTrainface.

And no, this was not a reluctant bowing to the ever-strange mind of the internet. If anything, MTR Express gloated in a statement that, where Britain had ignored the voice of the people, this newly chosen name “will be welcomed by many, not just in Sweden.”

All that was missing was Ringo Starr to do the narration, accompanied by a certain tank engine theme song. (And if you didn’t want that earworm in your head … oops.)

OK, it’s ridiculous. It’s not going to bring justice, health care, and a free copy of the works of Elvis Presley to every human being on the globe. But if it brings a chuckle and a smile for just a minute, that’s not to be despised.

In fact, I’ll go beyond that. It shows how powerful a force simple joy can be.

We’ve seen the opposite for a while. Anger can rally people. Fear can make them huddle together against a perceived foe or danger. Suspicion can fuel talk, and theorizing, and endless opportunities for those with an agenda to promote. After a while, it becomes a feedback cycle, a circle that draws ever tighter against a seemingly threatening world.

The trouble is, it’s hard to build anything when your fists are clenched. Anger and fear provide plenty of enemies to defeat, but little to raise in their place. It’s a hunger that always needs to be fed, so that anyone could migrate from “us” to “them” with little warning,  from a wielder of the weapon to its newest target.  Even in the less intense cases, it’s fatiguing to always be looking over your shoulder … or even harmful, if it means you don’t see a crack in the sidewalk.

Building requires wonder.

It needs a desire to explore and consider the different.

It responds to hands that are open to tools, minds that are open to questions, lives that are open to the possibility of something that hasn’t been there before.

It may even need a bit of the cockeyed. Puns work (as much as they do) because someone can see two meanings of a word at once. Ideas work because someone can see two states of being at once – what’s in the world now, and what could be.

That’s how you build ideas, companies, inventions, stories, nations. And at its best, it sparks a joy and enthusiasm that can carry multitudes in its wake.

Not every idea will be good. Not every dream will bear fruit. But all of it can open a door to conversation instead of throwing up a wall.

“Don’t just tell me the quarterback sucks – tell me who should be playing.”

“Don’t just tell me the program won’t work – tell me what would work better.”

“Don’t just tell me the story doesn’t speak to you – help me craft one that can.”

It can be silly. It can be profound. But if it’s building joy instead of sapping hope, then we’re on the right track.

Even if it’s an unusual McTrain of thought.

Posted on

Showing Our Metal

Today’s not-so-random Rochat thought: I think bronze medalists may have the best of all possible worlds.

Yes, I know we’re nowhere near an Olympics. Stay with me, OK?

Consider. You’re recognized as one of the best in the world. You get your place on the stage. You’re less likely to worry about having just missed the top spot, like a silver medalist might, nor does your life get turned completely upside down the way a gold medalist’s does. (You also don’t get the same endorsement deals, but we’ll go there another day.) It’s accomplishment mixed with celebrity mixed with a certain amount of anonymity.

No, it’s not a bad deal at all.

And this year, maybe it’s just a little appropriate.

On Tuesday, Heather and I celebrate 19 years of marriage. The People With Names For Everything like to call this the bronze anniversary, which amuses me a bit. I mean, these are the same people who decreed that 10-year anniversaries are tin and that 17-year anniversaries get celebrated with furniture, which makes me wonder if the PWNFE needed their basements cleaned out and saw an opportunity.

But even for this crew, bronze is a curious choice.

Is this the anniversary to bask on a Florida beach and turn inviting shades of brown? (Or in my case, not-so-inviting shades of brilliant scarlet.)

Is this the time to join the late, great, Doc Savage, The Man of Bronze, on some hair-raising pulp adventure?

Is it an occasion to join an Ancient Greek re-creationist unit and load ourselves down with well-burnished swords, spears and breastplates?

OK, I know, the boring and mundane answer is that it’s an excuse to contribute to the American economy by purchasing a category of gift with a high material density that will live in the basement or garage forever … except when it mysteriously emerges at night to bruise a careless toe. I get it. (And the accompanying Band-Aids.)

But in all serious – maybe the PWNFE got it right this time.

Maybe, for a long-lived marriage, bronze is exactly the right choice.

I’m going to precede this by warning that I Am Not A Metallurgist, nor do I play one on TV. But I’m just enough of an amateur historian to know that bronze gets kind of an unfair rap when it’s compared to the iron weapons and armor that replaced it.

There’s a myth that iron replaced bronze because it was a clearly superior metal. Not really. While iron has its uses (especially in later eras that would make true steel), ancient bronze was a strong, useful material.

What it wasn’t was a highly available material. The alloy required materials that could be difficult or expensive to get, particularly tin, while iron was widely available. So iron was often cheaper, and soon was ubiquitous.

So. You have something surprisingly strong and beautiful, with a mix of components that aren’t easy to acquire – something that everyone wanted, but that was hard to possess.

If that’s not the definition of a good marriage, than what is?

After 19 years, I think we’ve had one of the great ones. Granted, we haven’t had tried wallpapering a room together yet (the ultimate test) but surviving chronic illness, newspaper schedules, and eight-hour drives with an anxious dog may be a decent substitute. Through it all, we still make a heck of a loving team, one that’s grown even stronger and more exciting since we started taking care of Missy six years ago.

So bring it on. The Games are underway and we’re ready to take the field again.

It’s time to go for the bronze.

Posted on

Words to the Wise

The seeker of truth gasped as he reached the summit. The all-seeing oracle stood before him, its single green eye piercing the mysteries of the universe. Surely, understanding was at hand.

“Oh, great one,” the acolyte proclaimed, “share your wisdom with this unworthy pilgrim, that even the smallest crumbs of enlightenment may illuminate his way.”

And lo, the oracle did consider, and the eye did peer, and in what seemed mere moments the deathless words appeared.

“ON A SATURDAY MORNING,” the voice chanted, “WHATEVER YOU MIGHT HAVE FELT CANNOT BE UNFELT.”

Um. Yeah.

No, I haven’t turned my talents toward writing purple-prose fantasy novels, or inspiring the next great cult movement. (Between the Denver Broncos and “Hamilton,” all the good fanatics have been skimmed off, anyway.) Instead, I’ve been quietly amusing myself with one of the Internet’s more curious toys, the “Inspirobot.”

This has actually been around for a couple of years at inspirobot.me, but it’s only in recent months that it’s attracted mass attention. Essentially, it’s an instant “inspirational poster” generator, designed to pull up an enlightening backdrop and randomly generated timeless wisdom.

Trust me. Deepak Chopra this ain’t. So far, the words for the ages have included gems such as:

  • “A dream and a suit kills.”
  • “Quit being.”
  • “What seems cool to musicians, seems uncool to the person behind the mask.”
  • “Prepare for ambition. Not imprisonment.”

It kind of makes the magic 8-ball seem deep and profound, doesn’t it?

Once in a while, it’ll actually hit something kind of … well, understandable, if not actually deep. Things like “Be happy, or forget it.”  Or “Don’t be kind. Be extremely kind.” Or my personal favorite, which cannot be run in its entirety in a family newspaper, “Sometimes one needs to call a s***show a s***show.”

Simultaneously, I find this comforting, and frightening, and maybe even a cause for hope.

The comforting part is simple. Our computers, which have mastered chess, triumphed at go, and embarrassed the greatest Jeopardy masters in history, still create hilariously bad fortune-cookie aphorisms. So there’s still one post-journalism job market left open for now.

The frightening part is how easy it is to distill meaning from even the most awkwardly constructed phrases. ( I’m still waiting for a philosophical movement to begin around “Liars find meaning in grown men” or “A glass of wine beats levitation.”) Many people do it every day with their favored politicians, personalities, and public figures, reinterpreting their words and actions to fit a comfortable world view. Once again, it’s all too easy to invoke the Paul Simon rule: “Still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”

And the cause for hope? However badly we may strain the search for meaning, we are still searching for it. We want things to make sense, even if we don’t always go about it in the right way or look in the right places. That’s at least the first step toward building something.

Of course, it still helps to have good material. And that’s why I’ve started to step away from the oracle of the Inspirobot and toward the Way of Gil. My six-year-old nephew has begun writing down his own dictates for life, and I rather like the direction:

“Good sport when you win but be nice.”

“Think, get so you know and reber (remember) so you get a A+.”

“Have fun, don’t play too ruff. But have fun!”

Mister Gil, the mountaintop awaits.

Posted on

Beyond Hopeless

The news couldn’t be worse for the general.

After all, his opponent had the most professional army in the world. The troops in the area didn’t just outnumber him, they outnumbered the city he was defending. Well, supposed to be defending – that same enemy army had pretty much kicked him around at will, overwhelming him at every point, sending his own troops not just into retreat, but often outright flight.

Only some convenient fog and a masterful escape had kept them all alive this long. And if the enemy ever committed to a hard pursuit even that might not last. After all, no one had told George Washington that he was going to win in the end. And if they had, at that moment, he might not have believed them.

“I am worried to death,” Washington wrote to his brother, as his army was uprooted from New York and chased into New Jersey and then Pennsylvania. “I think the game is pretty near up.”

This isn’t how we like to remember the American Revolution. Oh, sure, we take pride in having fought a giant. We may even remember images of Valley Forge, where the army starved and froze before coming out tougher than ever.

But we sit with the vantage point of centuries in our favor. We know we won. Of course we did. The British were fighting a different kind of war. They had an impossible situation in terms of logistics, communication, and coordination. And that was before French, Spanish, and Dutch allies turned it into a world war. The rebels had to win. Obviously.

Except it was anything but obvious at the time.

It never is, when you’re in the midst of the fight.

Washington wanted a clear-cut win on the battlefield. With rare exceptions, he wasn’t going to get it. His win had to be longer-term – to keep his army alive and together another day, another week, another year. When you can’t outfight your opponents, you have to outlast them.

But over time, outlasting becomes its own victory.

It’s a lesson I think most of us have had to learn. A lot of life’s problems don’t allow for a quick knockout punch, an easy resolution, and a fade to black with a wry quote on our lips. We get outmatched, even overwhelmed.

For Heather and me, it’s her medical situation, dealing with a laundry list of chronic illness – sometimes with Crohns, sometimes with multiple sclerosis, sometimes with the melodically-named but painfully-endured ankylosing spondylitis. It’s a situation that laughs at plans, where a day’s schedule may be completely rewritten because a condition decided to flare up.

For somebody else, it might be an impossible family situation, or a budget that’s circling the drain, or a change in the political winds that threatens fundamental needs for themselves or their loved ones. Everyone is fighting their own fight, and sometimes the fight can seem pretty darned hopeless.

But if we stay standing, if we stay in the fight, if we refuse to go down and go away, we can reach beyond hopeless. And then come out the other side.

Struggles are won by the side that gives up last.

Oh, it’ll be painful. It’ll be frustrating, even dispiriting. Washington himself famously shouted “Are these the men with which I am to defend America?” when his troops refused to rally and stand. There are no guarantees.

But if we stand, if we last, if we persevere and continue – one day, down the road, we may look back and realize how much we’ve done. And how inevitable it now seems.

It’s a shift in perspective that can be pretty amazing.

Maybe even Revolutionary.