Joe South: The Games People Play
Thanks to Chris’s comment I listened to Joe South’s song ‘Games People Play’ (1968) and spent time thinking about its lyrics (below). Here’s also Cajun original version to dance to. We love the bass player. Oh the games people play every night and every day Never meaning what they say never saying what they mean […]
Kurt Vonnegut on the Shape of Stories
In the Cornelsen coursebook I’m writing, and in my classes, I warn my students against turning their presentations into straight pitches. Robert McKee, the Hollywood scriptwriter, has pointed out that the audience doesn’t really engage with and is not convinced by a presentation that tries to sell only strong points. People aren’t dumb. They’ll instinctively […]
Eric Berne: Games People Play
A seminal, very useful book is turning 50 this coming year. Published in 1964, and the best selling non-fiction book of the 1960s, Games People Play by Dr. Eric Berne introduced Transactional Analysis, which looked closely at human relationships. He opted to study interaction as transaction, since he said we communicate to get something out […]
Yoda: A Jedi craves not these things.
Craving Yoda’s funny and wise pontifications, I went and found some quotes, with their charming and haunting backward sentence structure: No. Try not. Do… or do not. There is no try. — Much to learn, you still have. — Truly wonderful, the mind of a child is. — Ready, are you? What know you of […]
The GoldieBlox Rube Goldberg (Anti)-Princess Machine
I support GoldieBlox www.goldieblox.com, a toy startup dedicated to introducing girls to engineering through a combination of building toys and stories. That is, I bought 3 or 4 boxes of their first product from the USA on blind faith. The combination of hands-on building with hard and soft materials, abstract building materials and concrete characters, […]
Testing, scheduling, resuming
Testing. I hope to resume proper blogging when this book project is done. I’ve learned so much, including to love scheduling time. I think the way forward is to go back to the format I had at the beginning, which was to write once a week. That is valuable in that it allows a more […]