A long time ago, I was visiting a friend in Orange County, California. As long as I was in the area, I wanted to visit another friend who lived about 30 miles away. I thought that I could drive over in the morning, have lunch with my friend, and drive back in time for dinner. My Orange County friend said, "You can't do that. You could easily be stuck in traffic 3 to 4 hours in both directions...." That's gridlock. Nothing moves. The term comes from traffic patterns, especially in big cities, in which the volume of traffic exceeds the capacity of the streets and roads to handle it. Simple traffic jams become complex traffic jams, and everything comes to a halt: gridlock.

In his classic book on relationships, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie rightly said that the only argument you can win is the one you don't have. Most arguments are about pretty petty stuff. If you're old enough, you may recall an ongoing "discussion" in Ann Landers' columns (the original Ann, so you know that it really was a while ago) about the right way to put toilet paper on the holder. Some favored rolling from the top, while others insisted that rolling from the bottom was the correct way. For a long time I thought that was the most ridiculous argument possible. And then I heard Richard Bandler's story about the husband who became furious when his wife buttered the toast on the wrong side.

Have you noticed how many politicians and TV commentators want us to be afraid? It's understandable. Nothing catches a person's attention so quickly as fear. That is, after all, the function of the amygdala, the principal brain structure responsible for keeping us safe. The amygdala is fully functional at birth, and information from the external environment is filtered through the amygdala before going elsewhere in the brain.

It is about 6:30 on a frosty February morning in Michigan, and I have just updated Facebook and Twitter pages for SCS. While in the process of updating, I read the past couple days' worth of postings and tweets from "friends" and "followers." Very few of the postings said anything significant. Most of them focused on daily trivia, and my sense was that at least some of my "friends" were posting as an avoidance strategy. Rather than working on things that they really needed to be doing, cleaning the garage, reading, meditating, writing something substantial, or otherwise engaging in thoughtful or productive activity, they were posting something fairly superficial on Facebook or tweeting something not only superficial, but also brief.

The recent Supreme Court decision to allow corporations to spend freely to influence political campaigns has produced a spate of articles bemoaning the possibility that corporations will use that power to control the political process. The principal fear is that corporations will tell political candidates how to vote if they want to have corporate support or avoid corporate opposition. The reasoning of the Supreme Court (by a 5-4 majority view) was that citizens can make up their minds after hearing all voices, even if some of those voices are louder (because of dollars spent) than others.

Most people make New Year’s resolutions, whether they write them down or simply have the thought that next year will be different in one way or another. The most common New Year’s resolutions (if statistics are to be believed) are to lose weight, to quit smoking, and to get into better physical condition. If the random TV footage of people on the streets in the States is correct, those all seem to be worthwhile resolutions.

If LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter sound Geek to you, you’re only partially right. According to the statistics, very few of us who are over 50 are especially enamored of the new communication channels. Sure, we may have been the pioneers of e-mail, and most of us managed to adjust to cell phones without a problem, but we (and I’m in that group) haven’t quite figured out how to make good use of “social media.

One of the songs from the 1947 musical production “Brigadoon,” by Frederick Lowe and Alan Jay Lerner, included a song entitled, “It’s Almost Like Being in Love”:

What a day this has been / What a rare mood I'm in Why, it's almost like being in love There's a smile on my face / For the whole human race Why, it's almost like being in love.

Along about Thanksgiving time, the SCS Web site moved to a new Web hosting company. We’re now on BlueHost. One of the advantages of the new hosting service is that it will facilitate online instruction through a course management system called Moodle.

You may have noticed that the blogging software (GeekLog) has been updated as well. See especially the new poll, and let me know about the issues you want me to address, and I will keep those topics in mind. Meanwhile...

Happy Halloween!

What do you wish for? My grandmother used to say, “If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.” What she evidently failed to notice is that an occasional beggar would end up owning—and riding—a horse. Or perhaps even several horses. While I grew up believing in the need to work hard to achieve goals, the Abraham-Hicks materials and a variety of other publications, including Write It Down, Make It Happen, by Henriette Anne Klauser, has persuaded me that there’s a better way.