Google Sidewiki entry by Mike

Right

in reference to: Lawyer: Fort Hood suspect's rights violated | Houston & Texas News | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle (view on Google Sidewiki)

Staying Creative

Recently, we asked the readers what their tips for staying creative were. Sometimes creativity flows from the heavens, but other times, as we all know, it’s like drawing water from a stone. The following are the best tips you gave us.

1. Surround yourself with creative people. Hang out with writers, musicians, poets and artists. Often, just being in a creative environment will inspire you and refresh your creative mind.

2. Start somewhere. If you create a load of crap for a few pages, whether it’s creative writing in Word or sheet music, the brain loosens up and it’s easier to break through the barrier and come up with ideas.

3. Expose yourself. Not after too much vodka. Expose yourself to new art – books, music, paintings – all the time. If you’re a rocker, listen to funk. If you’re a crime writer, read fantasy. If you’re a productivity writer, read something about slacking off.

4. Develop a “morning ritual” that puts you in the zone – whether it’s stream-of-consciousness such as in tip 2, or a series of non-spectacular everyday actions in sequence that tell your brain it’s time to get in the zone. Perhaps you drink a coffee while watching the news before going for a morning walk – if you repeat the same actions before doing creative work for long enough, it eventually creates an association that tells the mind to get in a particular zone.

5. Use GTD techniques – free up your mind from the hassles of life by doing an info-dump so your head is clear enough to create instead of worry.

6. Never stop learning.

7. Imitate the real world – find beauty (or the ugly, depending on what inspires you) and try to extract the essence of it into your work. This may lead you to what you need to create, or it may just warm up the muse.

8. Drink too much coffee sometimes (one of my favorite submissions).

9. Do something new. Play chess. Read a book if you watch television and watch television if you read. Go outside. Sing in the shower.

10. Don’t be too precious about your work. Being inspired by ‘the muse’ is important, but if the doctor and the garbage man can do their jobs every day, then those in a creative line of work can too. Change your attitude towards your work.

11. Based on the theory that everything that can be created has been and creation is simply a process of combining existing ideas, consume information by the bucket load. The more you know, the more you can create from that knowledge.

12. Meet new people from different walks of life. Gain insight into their perspectives on life. Strike up a conversation on the bus.

13. Shut out the world. Instead of sucking in new information, sit quietly, go to sleep, or meditate. Stop thinking and clear your mind so that the clutter doesn’t get in the way of your thoughts.

14. Carry a camera with you and look for interesting things in your every day scenery. Hadn’t noticed that crack in the path before? Then it’ll do. Set a quota and force yourself to make it. Don’t go to new places to do this – force yourself to find new perspectives on old knowledge.

15. Creativity is a muscle. Exercise it daily – if you only need to create once a week, your muscles may have atrophied if you don’t do it just because you don’t have to.

16. Carry a notebook everywhere. Or a PDA.

17. Write down a list of ideas and draw random arrows between them. For instance, if you’re a blogger, write down everything in your Categories list and draw lines to connect unusual ideas. If you had the categories “Relationships” and “Management” and randomly connected them you’d have an interesting article idea to work with.

18. If you’re not on a tight deadline, walk away and do something completely unrelated. Don’t let yourself spend that time stressing about what you need to do.

19. Create a framework. As many writers have said, the blank page can be the biggest show-stopper. Instead of trying to rely on pure inspiration, set your topic or theme and start creating within confines. Think within the box you create for yourself.

20. Remove obstacles to creativity. That friend who calls to complain about their life can wait until you can afford to get stressed about their problems.

21. Don’t judge your ideas until you have plenty to judge. Don’t be embarrassed by yourself – just write them all down! Even if you start with “pink polka-dotted lizard.”

22. Keep a journal. It can get your mind working, and in a month, or a year, when you’ve gained some distance from what you’ve written it can give you new ideas.

23. Stop telling yourself you’re not creative. If you tell yourself not to come up with ideas, then you probably won’t – no matter how hard you try.

24. Don’t be a workaholic – take breaks. Your mind needs a chance to wind down so it doesn’t overheat and crash.

25. Experiment randomly. What does a flanger sound like on a vocal track? Like Lenny Kravitz, of course.

26. Treat creativity like an enemy in a strategy game; if one thing isn’t working, don’t keep trying until you give up. Try a new strategy. Run through the whole list, not just the first tip.

27. Choose a topic and write about it as wonderfully or badly as you possibly can. Then edit it as ruthlessly as a newspaper editor who has thousands of words to edit in the next hour and doesn’t care what gets lost in the process. At the end you might have something decent to use as a starting point.

28. Trash what you’re working on. Start again.

29. Exercise every day, before you sit down to be creative. If you exercise afterwards you’ll get the creative burst – just too late.

30. Spend time with your children. Or someone else’s.

---

Offering a unique perspective and insight on productivity based on his experience as a blogger, writer, musician, family man and manager, Joel Falconer has been published online and off, and brings to Lifehack's readers critical news and practical advice you can use to make life more liveable.

Don't Go Into Corporate America" [Byron York]

Michelle Obama: "Don't Go Into Corporate America" [Byron York]

I have a new story today about Michelle Obama's visit to Zanesville, Ohio, where she met with a group of women at a local day care center. According to the U.S. Census, Muskingum County, where Zanesville is located, had a median household income of $37,192 in 2004, below both the Ohio and national averages. Just 12.2 percent of adults in the county have a bachelor's degree or higher, also well below the state and national averages. About 20 percent don't have a high school degree. Nevertheless, Mrs. Obama urged them to foreswear lucrative professions like corporate law or hedge fund management and go into the helping industry, even if the sacrifice is great:

As she has many times in the past, Mrs. Obama complains about the lasting burden of student loans dating from her days at Princeton and Harvard Law School. She talks about people who end up taking years and years, until middle age, to pay off their debts. “The salaries don’t keep up with the cost of paying off the debt, so you’re in your 40s, still paying off your debt at a time when you have to save for your kids,” she says.

“Barack and I were in that position,” she continues. “The only reason we’re not in that position is that Barack wrote two best-selling books… It was like Jack and his magic beans. But up until a few years ago, we were struggling to figure out how we would save for our kids.” A former attorney with the white-shoe Chicago firm of Sidley & Austin, Obama explains that she and her husband made the choice to give up lucrative jobs in favor of community service. “We left corporate America, which is a lot of what we’re asking young people to do,” she tells the women. “Don’t go into corporate America. You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. Those are the careers that we need, and we’re encouraging our young people to do that. But if you make that choice, as we did, to move out of the money-making industry into the helping industry, then your salaries respond.” Faced with that reality, she adds, “many of our bright stars are going into corporate law or hedge-fund management.”

What she doesn’t mention is that the helping industry has treated her pretty well. In 2006, the Chicago Tribune reported that Mrs. Obama’s compensation at the University of Chicago Hospital, where she is a vice president for community affairs, jumped from $121,910 in 2004, just before her husband was elected to the Senate, to $316,962 in 2005, just after he took office. And that does not count the money Mrs. Obama receives from serving on corporate boards. She would have been O.K. even without Jack’s magic beans.

Mrs. Obama also bemoaned the amount of money she has to spend — nearly one-third of the median household income in Zanesville — on piano, dance, and other lessons for her two children. But she was grateful for the concern her husband's supporters have shown for her. "Everywhere I go, no matter what, the women in the audience, their first question for me is, 'How on earth are you managing it, how are you keeping it all together?'" she told the women.


I don't mind her getting all the money she can. But don't tell others to be happy with what they have. She should be telling them to get the best education they can and go where they can make the most of there life's. Do what you want even if it in industry or teaching or working in a law office.

Michelle Obama thinks you're worthless and stupid, thinks voting for her husband will be the only worthwhile thing you ever do.

For the First Time in My Adult Lifetime, I Am Really Proud of My Country," said Michelle Obama, rich lawyer and wife of Barack Hussein (same last name), yesterday.

Excuse me? A female, African-American, Princeton-and-Harvard-educated attorney, who has achieved a great deal in her life, who lived through the Civil Rights revolution (and was the daughter of a Chicago city worker who really experienced those events), and who is married to an African-American man who is a U.S. Senator, has never been proud of her country before?

Putting that aside for a moment, what is it that we've suddenly done to -- finally -- make her proud now? Allow her husband to enter a primary that he hasn't even won yet?

Let me get this straight: a couple of ultra-successful, Ivy League-educated, wealthy, elitist liberals who have never been proud of their country want all of us little people to vote for them to be our PRESIDENT and FIRST LADY?

They want to represent a people, and govern a country, that has never, once, ever in their adult lives made them proud?

Wow.

This utter lack of pride in their country or its people is ESPECIALLY damning in light of the amazing and praiseworthy work that President Bush has done for Africa during his terms as President -- especially given the fact that Obama still has family there (which seems a bit strange, given that he is so wealthy and, apparently, holy and powerful -- why is his grandmother still living in a hut in a desolate village on the Dark Continent when her son is this successful in America?).

Anyway, just shut up and vote for Barack so that his wife can finally appreciate something you stupid people in this country she is so forcibly made to endure living in have done.

Got it?

Wonder how they can take care of all of us in America when they can't even get grandma a house to live in. Never thought Hillery would look good until I watched his speech in Houston last night.

RWN Poll Results: Who Would You Like To See John McCain Select As His VP?

RWN's readers were polled on this question and there were more than 1300 responses. Here's how the numbers broke out,

Rick Perry: 0% (3)
Rob Portman: 0% (4)
Mike Pence: 1% (8)
John Thune: 1% (9)
Tom Coburn: 1% (17)
Kay Bailey Hutchison: 1% (18)
Mark Sanford: 2% (25)
Joe Lieberman: 2% (27)
Rudy Giuliani: 2% (32)
Colin Powell: 3% (34)
Tim Pawlenty: 3% (38)
Sarah Palin: 3% (41)
Mike Huckabee: 3% (43)
Marsha Blackburn: 4% (49)
Jim DeMint: 4% (54)
Condi Rice: 9% (118)
Mitt Romney: 10% (134)
Duncan Hunter: 12% (155)
JC Watts: 14% (181)
Fred Thompson: 24% (315)

Given that we're talking about "Mr. Maverick" here, these results are probably a pretty good indication that either Rick Perry or Rob Portman has an inside track on the VP slot.

This is what I think.

I think Hunter or Watts would be the best way to go. With Hunter he could mend a lot of fences with the right and with Watts he could pick up some of the black vote and right wing votes both. I don't think Rice would add anything in the way of votes, to close to Bush. Thompson, would not do anything, he does not want to work at it. Romney could pick him up some votes, but I think McCain would feel threaten by him for 4 years and nothing would get passed. Those two would still be fighting with each other. I don't see anyone else on the list that would help him in anyway.

More of the Same

Obama sells same old stuff

Terence Corcoran, National Post Published: Saturday, February 16, 2008

Somewhere and sometime between now and the Democratic convention, populist glamour boy Barack Obama's charisma can be expected to run out of candlepower. Not totally, of course. He'll always be able to raise a crowd to its feet and bedazzle some people -- like the sensible-looking thirtysomething woman interviewed last Tuesday by the CBC at a Washington pub after Mr. Obama swept the Potomac states. Suspending rational judgment, she said: "Are you kidding me? I'd walk over hot coals to vote for this man. I mean, oh, he's just ... he's a man that can change not our country, but the world."

Maybe she would walk on coals for Mr. Obama, but she should know that it's gonna hurt. Whatever the undeniably mesmerizing, ga-ga-inducing qualities of Mr. Obama's speechifying technique, at some point these skills are going to wear thin as people begin to spend a little time thinking about what he's saying. Although thinking apparently isn't something that's necessarily top of the Obama agenda. Michelle Obama reportedly advised her husband to suspend cerebral activity during political debates. "Feel--don't think," she said.

That advice is strangely similar to the advice Chris Rock received in Head of State, a very bad comedy about a black guy -- played by Mr. Rock -- who runs for president of the United States. Just before delivering a pre-set text from a Teleprompter, Mr. Rock is taken aside by his semi-violent and near-pathological brother and told to ignore the set speech and speak what he really feels -- from the heart. Which Mr. Rock promptly does, and instantly turns himself into a wildly popular man of the people with a speech that includes such Obamaish lines as: "You know what you need. Better schools, better jobs, less crime. How many of you, right now, work two jobs just to have enough money to be broke?"

An Obama speech is the work of much better screenwriters, even though at last count Mr. Rock's effort had grossed $38-million. Mr. Obama is expected to raise that much this month alone. How long can this go on? Recent polls suggest Hillary Clinton is well ahead of Mr. Obama in Ohio and Pennsylvania, although Texas is close. Is Ms. Clinton about to turn the corner against Obama?

If primary voters actually spent time with Mr. Obama's speeches and ideas rather than react to his oratorical skills

and rhetorical devices, some might begin to wonder what all the fuss is about. Mr. Obama can deliver rhythmic cadences and rolling repetitive references to "change" and "dreams" and "hope." As he said: "No dream is beyond beyond our grasp if we reach for it, and fight for it, and work for it."

When it comes down to content, however, an Obama speech is not about change at all. It's about more of the same, more of the same old anti-corporate demagoguery, more of the same old attacks on CEO bonuses, Exxon, gouging businesses. There are ritual panderings to big labour and populist notions of free trade and NAFTA and China --

On NAFTA and trade, under which businesses "ship jobs overseas and force parents to compete with their teenagers to work for minimum wage at Wal-Mart," Mr. Obama is playing on the same old populist mythologies that have driven political debate in America for more than a century -- the little people versus the wealthy, the lobbyists, the powerful, profits, special interests, the privileged.

How many proud Wal-Mart workers would find that demeaning reference offensive? Mr. Obama plays off such corporate images. After mentioning Exxon's record profits and high gasoline prices, he later introduces the teacher who works at the night shift at Dunkin Donuts. Will hard-working two-job-holding Americans really take kindly to a politician who tells them their effort is an unnecessary and even futile one that can only be fixed by going after excessive CEO bonus payouts?

When it comes to policy and prescriptions, the grand calls for change and hope soon spiral down to endless lists of tired and familiar programs and payments and promises. In another speech on Wednesday at a General Motors plant in Janesville, Wisc., Mr. Obama ran through thousands of words proposing enough initiatives to keep the same old Dem.-Rep. congressional crown busy for half a decade of the same old political games he says he wants to get rid of -- from universal health care to minimum wage increases to doubling the number of low-income people receiving an earned income tax credit, worth $1,000 a year.

What Barack Obama offers is more, much more, of the same old politics jazzed up by a dazzling salesman with a great big smile. For how long will Americans buy it?

UPI employee of the year

Media watchers have been wondering how long it will take press representatives to start attacking John McCain now that he's become almost the certain Republican nominee for president.

On February 16, the wait ended, as the Associated Press went on a literally vulgar tirade about the Arizona senator's temper that would make Madonna blush.

Almost.

As reported Saturday (emphasis added throughout, h/t NBer DaBird, readers are warned about voluminous edited vulgarity):

Story Continues Below Ad ↓

Temper, temper. Republican John McCain is known for his. He's been dubbed "Senator Hothead" by more than one publication, but he's also had some success extracting his hatchet from several foreheads.

Even his Republican Senate colleagues are not spared his sharp tongue.

"F--- you," he shouted at Texas Sen. John Cornyn last year.

"Only an a------ would put together a budget like this," he told the former Budget Committee chairman, Sen. Pete Domenici, in 1999.

"I'm calling you a f------ jerk!" he once retorted to Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley.

With Cornyn, he smoothed things over quickly. The two argued during a meeting on immigration legislation; Cornyn complained that McCain seemed to parachute in during the final stages of negotiations. "F--- you. I know more about this than anyone else in the room," McCain reportedly shouted.

Hmmm. Three edited f-words in the first six paragraphs. Could that be a wire service record?

Sadly, all that vulgarity was a set-up to dissuade voters from considering McCain:

The political landscape in Arizona, McCain's home state, is littered with those who have incurred his wrath. Former Gov. Jane Hull pretended to hold a telephone receiver away from her ear to demonstrate a typical outburst from McCain in a 1999 interview with The New York Times.

McCain has even blown up at volunteers and, on occasion, the average Joe.

He often pokes fun at his reputation: "Thanks for the question, you little jerk," he said last year to a New Hampshire high school student wondering if McCain, at 71, was too old to be president.

Other times, his ire is all too real. This has prompted questions about whether his temperament is suited to the office of commander-in-chief or whether it might handicap him in a presidential campaign against either Barack Obama or Hillary Rodham Clinton, who are not known for such outbursts.

"I decided I didn't want this guy anywhere near a trigger," Domenici told Newsweek in 2000.

Hillary Clinton is not known for such outbursts? Really? That's not what George Stephanopoulos and Dee Dee Myers have said.

In fact, according to multiple former colleagues of the current junior senator from New York, she has a mouth that would make an AP writer blush.

Almost.

Looks like they all come from U-Plumb-It.