Floaters... a post inspired by the Chris Matthews statement that Obama's "got floaters, like Valerie Jarrett, floating around."

See the the previous post for the context and analysis of the quote. This is a more light-hearted exploration of "floaters."

1. "Float On," by The Floaters... a hit song from 1977. Lyrics here. Each Floater — Ralph, Charles, Paul, Larry — has his own verse in which he begins by announcing his astrological sign and proceeds to tell use what kind of women he likes. Ralph, the Aquarius, likes "a woman who loves her freedom," etc.

2. "Float On," by Modest Mouse, is a completely different song. It's about not worrying about your problems: "Even if things get heavy, we'll all float on/Alright already, we'll all float on alright."

3. The top definition for "floater" at Urban Dictionary is: "a social mastermind who wavers between members of one particular clique or between multiple cliques in general, pitting people against one another and leeching out information without seeming like a threat." Definitions #2, #3, and #5 refer to buoyant fecal matter. Definition #4 refers to those bits in your eyes, and #6 is "A dead body found in the water."

4. In Adelaide, they eat a comfort food called a "pie floater." "Anthony Bourdain, Joe Cocker, Billy Connolly, Nigel Mansell, Shane Warne and Angus Young are high profile fans of the pie floater."

5. Bob Dylan has a song called "Floater (Too Much To Ask)." The word "floater" does not appear in the song, though Bob appears in a boat in verse #3 fishing for bullheads, and in verse #12, there's a reference to "rebel rivers," which include the Ohio, the Cumberland, the Tennessee.

Scanning the Washington Post front page, contemplating the value of paying to penetrate the paywall...

... I get to this...



... and I wonder, who is this stuff for? Hosting a Q&A with an astrologer? Dr. Ruth "says some frank things about... sex"?

It's like their brand is the anti-news paper. 

"Find out what's in store for your sign"? I bet they don't even know what's in store for their paywall experiment.

Breaking up mother's collection of 700 dolls.

After she said, before dying, "I hope they all stay together."

After a dealer offered $35,000. Then...

Thanks to the recession, dealers and auction houses were no longer scooping up collections the way they had before. Not only that, but people tend to buy the toys of their youth in their 30s, 40s and 50s, and Mama Jo’s dolls, I was told, were “aging out.” Our local doll museum, like others across the country, was on the verge of collapse.

One doll lover came for a look. “Honey, you should have taken that money,” he said. “You were standing on the edge of the ledge of the canyon.” He made a karate-chopping motion in the air with his hand.

I prayed. I saw a therapist. I consulted an astrologer. Finally, after a shamanic healing, I became unstuck. Maybe I was just ready to let go of my grief.

When I read "astrologer" and "unstuck," any sympathy over this plight melted away. (Somehow "unstuck" is a word that annoys me more than "shamanic.") Also, I watched the video:



Somehow, I just don't believe that this was a serious emotional struggle and I don't get the enchantment of the dolls. The mother's engagement with the dolls — seen a bit in the video — is lighter and sweeter than you might expect, given the author's presentation of the collection — and keeping it together (metaphor alert!) — as a profound burden. The author is Jo Maeder and she got a book out of the (faux?) ordeal.

***

Happy Mother's Day! Call your mom, if you're lucky enough to have a mom that's callable. If not, I hope the memories that flow into the foreground are not burdensome and require no therapy or astrology or shamanic healing to allow you to go forward and flourish.

"Corporate America has its own religions, and one of them is Myers-Briggs."

Yea, even as there are 12 signs of the zodiac in Astrology, there are 16 personality types in Myers-Briggs.

Academics would contend that... Myers-Briggs... [is] about belief much more than scientific evidence. And it’s administered by leadership coaches who, by and large, have no formal education in the science of psychology. 

“People like it because it reveals something they didn’t know about themselves or others,” says [Adam Grant, a professor of industrial psychology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School]. “That could be true of a horoscope, too.”

Even Katharine Downing Myers concedes that “psychologists had no use for the indicator; they felt that Jung was a crazy mystic.”

And yet the psychological community has been reticent to speak up too vocally against it. The fact is, many psychology professors do lucrative side work as organizational consultants. And as taboo as it is to praise Myers-Briggs in U.S. academia, it’s equally taboo to disparage it in corporate America.

Maybe if it were understood to be more of a religion/religion substitute, corporate America could overcome its embarrassing dependency on this pseudoscience.