/Jinx/

"Go the rest of the year undefeated?"

"Right now I'm just confident the Jazz will every game…"

Two texts Brad and I traded in the middle of the Jazz's 12 game winning streak last year, before the team finished the season on an 8-16 stretch that included a punishing first round execution at the hands of the Lakers.

The zenith and the nadir all in the span of two months.

With that in mind, it is hard to get too excited about the Jazz's recent 18-3 run which included a miracle shot by a D-leaguer over King James and the 8th greatest comeback in NBA history (and 2nd greatest on the road).

On the other hand: they are winning road games (14-12), they are winning games they should be winning (vs >.500 teams: 14-3), and they are coming back from games in which they are down at halftime (too lazy to look up the stats).

I still don't think they can compete with the Nuggets or the Lakers in a 7 game playoff. But they are playing up to their ability. And isn't that all you can ask for as a fan?

Cognitive dissonance FTW

A friend who owns a few preschools was telling me a story about some of the "hippie" kids. Since hand washing is on the curriculum, the kids have to learn the "proper" way to wash their hands. Basically it just involves more time, a lot of soap and some running water at the beginning and end. (It’s well established that hand washing, in and of itself, can prevent a number of infections and illnesses. FYI: Not the flu, which is a respiratory infection.)

That, of course, isn't what their parents teach. "Hippie" parents teach that using too much water for hand washing (say, more than a second) kills the earth. Disease be damned.

The cognitive dissonance pops up when, on parents night, the kids have to demonstrate what they've learned. That puts the kids in a tricky situation. Do the kids do it wrong according to their teacher or their parent?

I don't remember having to deal with that kind of cognitive dissonance until I was much older. Like High School-aged. Especially at such an early age (3-6) and for something as simple as hand washing. (My parents taught me to do it. It stuck until I was old enough to decide if it was important. I agreed with it at that point, and now I look down my nose at the unclean people who don't wash their hands after they go to the bathroom.)

Nowadays, kids don't have it that easy. Hell, nobody does. Every choice is polarizing. Even choices that used to be simple and straightforward, like grocery or clothes shopping, have becoming these meaningful choices. Do you support sweat shops? Factory farming? Corn subsidies? Corn syrup? A debt-based economy?

No matter what you choose, there is bound to be someone who deeply believes that your choice is immoral. And they can't all be wrong.

The jamais vu of good art

The other day, I saw a note that one of my friends is asthmatic and I couldn't believe it. A-S-T-H-M-A-T-I-C. The word looked wrong. So I wrote asthma a few times on a post-it note. A-S-T-H-M-A. Asthma. And it still looked wrong. Even though I knew, logically, that it was spelled correctly.

Naturally, the French have a term—Jamais vu—for these times when the familiar seems unfamiliar. And it's basically the opposite of déjà vu.

But this isn't about what I can learn from wikipedia. The idea of jamais vu got me thinking about good books, movies, video games and TV show.

Much like that restaurant you've driven by a million times but never noticed until today, a good piece or art will take something you've seen a million times but make it feel like you're only just experiencing it for the first time.

So with something like Modern Family or Community, you end up accepting all of the sitcom or teenage movie cliches because you just don't quite know that you've ever experienced them before. Even though, logically, you know you have.

BTW... Modern Family, Community and Parks and Recreation are the three best shows on TV right now. The only bad thing I can say about any of them, is that they really make you see how much The Office and 30 Rock have declined.

Public Service Announcement #3

Back up your hard drive today. Or even better, right now.

Unfortunately, the file structure on my laptop's hard drive was corrupted earlier in the day.

Good news: I use Time Machine on a monthly basis and my hard drive was still accessible via Target Disk Mode.

Bad news: My last backup was from five weeks ago because I got lazy.

I didn't lose anything irretrievable, but not having a more recent backup is still going to cost me about a half a day of my life.

The moral of the story: All hard disk drives are guaranteed to fail. Back up your hard drive daily. And back up your backup monthly.

The Infinity of Lists

My 55 favorite albums of the past decade, more or less -- and sure to change by tomorrow. Scroll over the image if you are curious about an artist/album title.