Matt Blackwood
[Read more…] about To pergola or not to pergola: on not retiring useful hands
When your words and your body language aren’t singing the same song…
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Chris Nichol
… we know you’re lying. I’ve been experiencing an awkward state of unease for close to 50 years now. And I hadn’t been able to put my finger on quite what it was until I heard an interview on Radio NZ National’s Nine to Noon programme. Lynn Freeman was talking with Harvard Business School social psychologist Amy Cuddy about body language, and especially about the significance of dissonance between words and actions.
Donald Trump provided her with a good example. She’s identified that he tries to adapt his body language to match his words. But it doesn’t work and that’s why he seems inauthentic.
[Read more…] about When your words and your body language aren’t singing the same song…
Depression: back from the dead and celebrating life
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Mark Thomas
Like a shorter, slower version of the great All Black John Kirwan, I have decided to speak up about depression. My life is fantastic and I get immense pleasure from my love of sport, travel and the amazing people around me. But here’s a simple statement of medical fact: I have experienced major episodes of clinical depression since the age of 18. I don’t know how that works, how the same mind that allows me to drink in life like an intoxicating nectar can also turn dog on me and drag me to the depths of emotional hell, but that is the truth of it. I do know that depression can afflict anyone, regardless of how good or seemingly enviable their life is, just as cancer, heart disease or any other illness can strike anybody, regardless of how happy, famous or wealthy they are.
[Read more…] about Depression: back from the dead and celebrating life
The Act (not Art) of Drawing
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Louisa Baillie
Why? In our first years of life are we encouraged, and we ourselves desire, to learn of things beyond our skin barrier using touch, especially through our hands, attached as they are to the extremities of two highly mobile limbs, each hand with four fingers and an opposing thumb, 27 bones, 17 intrinsic muscles, 18 extrinsic muscles 
originating in the forearm, specialised nerve endings (including Merkel’s discs, Pacinian, Meissner’s and Ruffini’s corpuscles and hair follicle receptor lanceolate endings) which detect light or deep pressure, position, vibration, shapes, edges—hands that are trained to grasp, squeeze, pinch, pat, poke, point, that can stroke a polished surface of marble or plaster or a young baby’s skin and on that smoothness feel the merest rough patch of, say, a tiny grain of salt. Yet by the time a child in our culture is about seven years of age, her hands are already semi-retired. Why?
Doctoring fabric: an after-hours affliction
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Dr Tree Cocks
Disorder: Textile Junkie
Definition: Finding a length of fabric at the bottom of your stash, feeling it and falling in love with it all over again. You bring it to the top of the stash, sure (all over again) that you will find the perfect project to use it in.
Cure: There is none
[Read more…] about Doctoring fabric: an after-hours affliction
Wild play: the education behind a great anatomist.
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Louisa Baillie
A baby, the family’s tenth and last child, is born in 1728 to a Scottish couple farming at East Kilbride, south of Glasgow. He is named John, with the hope that he will survive infancy, unlike a previous baby, also named John. The family is described as “struggling”. So it is likely there was no servant help for the substantial daily work load. I will imagine that near the house is a ‘kail yard’ to hoe, to grow kail (kale) the most commonly cultivated green. Close by are hens and a milking cow. On the farmland itself grow oats, and sheep and cattle. At lambing/calving season those farm animals require intense tending. I’ll bet that often the wind’s maw is bleak and cold. Animals are culled and butchered for home use, and sheep shorn for wool to spin then weave. Regularly the men tramp on and beyond the farm to hunt or snare wild game such as salmon, trout, rabbit, hare and grouse. Domestic tasks include milking of the cow, and from that milk the making of butter and cheese. There are clothes to stitch, candles to make, floors to sweep, a kitchen table to scrub, fires to tend, meals to cook and of course the physically demanding job of filling tubs with water for the hand washing of clothes. Why am I describing this? [Read more…] about Wild play: the education behind a great anatomist.