Optimist Or Pessimist?

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

Yesterday I wrote about whether your glass is half full or half empty.

Closely related to that, though also slightly different in degree perhaps, is whether you are an optimist or a pessimist.

I have a friend who has gone through life with a “when one closes another one shuts” philosophy. He also says things like, “Behind every silver lining there’s a cloud”.

It’s amusing, but in his case and I would guess in a good many others, that attitude eventually becomes a self-fulfilling predicament. He’s never taken any chances in life and he has been in a job that he never really cared for, for the past 30 years or so. He’s just counting the days until he can retire and he has been doing that for many, many years, not just recently. Sad, but it can’t be helped, or rather he can’t be helped.

As well as creating an aversion to any sort of risk, if you think things will go wrong then they usually will, and more often than not it’s your own fault. If you set out to do something with failure uppermost in your mind, you psych yourself out of giving 100 percent to the task at hand. If you don’t give it that 100 percent effort then it will either not turn out as good as it could have, or it will fail completely. In such cases the pessimist always blames things like bad luck, or other people, never their own defeatist attitude from the outset.

An optimistic person, on the other hand, will approach a task thinking it is going to succeed. Therefore in their case they will put much more care and effort into it (even sometimes subconsciously) thereby raising their chances of succeeding. Don’t get me wrong, starting off with an optimistic viewpoint will not guarantee success, it will just make for a better attempt at the job, and the better the job you do the better are the chances it will succeed.

Failure will stop a pessimist dead in his tracks because he is sure he is going to fail from the beginning and when it happens he shrugs his shoulders and packs up and goes home.

But failure won’t do the same for a person with an optimistic outlook. An optimist is surprised by failure. He usually wants to know why it happened, so he will analyze it and then try again.

And that is one of the great secrets to success. Sir Winston Churchill probably defined it best when he said that “success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm”, and although Churchill is now remembered for his notable political victories and war-time leadership, he also had his fare share of defeats as well along the way.

I have been part of several projects that have been complete failures, but that never stopped me from getting back up, dusting myself down, and trying again. And if you stay optimistic and work accordingly giving 100 percent of your effort then sooner or later you will succeed.

I’m very optimistic about that!

PS: I haven’t tried this out, but they say you should always borrow money from a pessimist, because he doesn’t expect to get paid back!

Is Your Glass Half Full, Or Half Empty?

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

“Some people see the glass half full.

Others see it half empty.

I see a glass that's twice as big as it needs to be.” 

George Carlin

Just a short post today, but it covers a big philosophical question.


How do you look at things in life?


Is your glass always half full or half empty?


The Australian airline Quantas has never had a major accident. Does this mean that you have confidence that it is the safest airline in the world? Or does it make you think that maybe the odds are that it’s due for an accident?


If you’re playing the tables in Vegas or Atlantic City or somewhere, does the fact that you’ve lost the last ten hands make you think that your luck is out for the night and you leave. Or do you think the laws of probability mean your luck must be due to change shortly and you hang in there?


There’s no right or wrong answers here. It just depends on what type of person you are.


People who are naturally in the glass half empty category tend to be the ones who play it safe. Work for someone else, are content with a lesser but safer position, don’t over extend themselves financially, etc. For that type of person such decisions make for a much happier and contented life.


Other people, me for example, are more in the glass half full category. More prone to taking risks, trying new things (like blogging even!), and starting their own businesses. That can bring great rewards, but it can cause more than a little turmoil financially and otherwise in your life too, particularly in the economic times we are currently living through. The safe option it is not!


It takes both types to make the world go round and both are equally important.


There’s no point in starting your own business if there’s no one willing to be employed; and there’s no point in looking for a job if there’s no one willing to take the risk and start a business (they all had to start somewhere, even the giant multi nationals).


So what’s the best? It depends on you.


What’s right? Again, it depends on you.


Just don’t waste your time with the stupid pursuit of wondering if the grass is greener somewhere else if you don’t have the courage to go and find out.


Whatever way suits you at least be content with your decision.


That my friends is the simplest secret to enjoying your life. 


(According to me anyhow!)

Here's a video. 


Enjoy!

The Late, Great Mr. Harry Meadows

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

This week seems to be turning into a bit of a tribute week. Yesterday I paid tribute to Stephen Pile who was the worst founder of a club ever! Today I would like to take a little time to pay my tribute to Mr Harry Meadows.

I’ll come back to Harry in a moment. First a general comment. Old folk are peculiar at times. As I get older myself I understand more and more why. But despite my tolerance level for idiots heading inexorably towards zero, I’d like to think that even in my later years, if I am spared, I would retain my sense of humor. I would hate to just become another miserable old ‘git’.

Speaking of which, when one of my aunts died a lot of years ago, I was helping to make the funeral arrangements, part of which involved organizing the undertaker. When he arrived at the Nursing Home she had been staying in to do his thing I noticed that he was in a van and not a hearse.

Always curious, I asked him why this was the case. “Oh dear,” he said. “You have no idea. We were forced to buy the van for coming to places like this. If we arrived here in the hearse it caused so much distress and panic amongst the residents who all thought their time had come and we were there for them that the Home owners all demanded that we get a different form of transport or lose the business.” So now you know.

Back to Harry Meadows.

I have no doubt that most, if not all, of you will never have heard of Harry. He wasn’t a famous man, didn’t invent anything special, wasn’t a public personality, in fact he was just an ordinary person like the rest of us.

Except one thing he did have in common with me at any rate was a sense of humor, and one that was right on the edge.

Harry was a resident at an old peoples’ home in the 1960s. It was called the Haslemere Home for the Elderly and it was located in Great Yarmouth in Britain. Haslemere, at that time anyway, had the largest elderly population in the country.

The Home had first hit the headlines in September 1960, when another of the residents, 81 years young Gladys Elton, decided it would be good fun and would break the monotony of the place if she performed a striptease, which she duly did.

Unfortunately Gladys must have been hot stuff, too hot in fact, because the excitement she generated with her performance was too much for one of the male residents who as a result died of cardiac arrest. Five more of the inmates of the Home also had to be treated for shock.

Old Gladys must have been quite a ‘goer’!

So what about Harry Meadows?

Well Harry didn’t take part in the striptease, but the following year, in 1961, Harry who at the time was 87 years old, thought it would be funny if he dressed up as the Grim Reaper. He duly did so and then from outside the Home, peered through the windows complete with a scythe in hand.

Unfortunately Harry had an even bigger effect on the inmates than Gladys. This time three of them died of shock at seeing the Grim Reaper outside their window!

The Home was subsequently closed. I don’t know what happened to Harry.

Is this tragic or funny? To me it’s funny that it happened and tragic that there are not more people in the world like Gladys and Harry.

Cat Flaps!

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”


 Believe me when I say that when I started this blog that the farthest thing from my mind was cat flaps. Why would anyone, except a real cat fanatic ever blog about them? They are surely one of the most awful things ever invented. Yes, they let your cat in and out, if you are too lazy to open the door. But if they let your cat in, they'll let other cats in as well, and small dogs, rats the size of cats, foxes too perhaps, who knows. All in all, a bad job. In my opinion, of course. I suppose its fortunate that this blog is about my opinion ;o)

 One thing there can’t be any argument about however is that cat flaps aren't designed for, or to be used by, humans - not by normal sized ones anyway.

 Oh yes, that's why they're being written about in this blog. I knew there was a reason.


 First of all there was Jason Evans, of Eastleigh, Hampshire. Poor Jason managed to spend six hours stuck in one after using it in an attempt to get into his house. He was eventually cut free by firemen.

 The indignity of that was bad enough, but that was nothing to what happened in Germany, where apparently they have them too.

 "In retrospect, I admit it was unwise to try to gain access to my house via the cat flap," Gunther Burpus admitted to reporters in Bremen, Germany. "I suppose that the reason they're called cat flaps rather than human flaps is because they're too small for people, and perhaps I should have realised that."

 Intellectually challenged Mr Burpus had been trying to use the cat flap because he had mislaid his keys. He got stuck, as someone a bit smarter than Mr Burpus would have realized beforehand, and remained wedged there for two days because passers by thought he was a piece of installation art. What??

 Unfortunately for Mr Burpus – or maybe I should have said, more unfortunately, because he was already stuck in a cat flap for goodness sake - he was spotted by a group of student pranksters who removed his trousers and pants, painted his bottom bright blue, stuck a daffodil between his buttocks and erected a sign saying 'Germany Resurgent, An Essay In Street Art. Please give generously'.

 "I kept calling for help," he said, "but people just said "Very good"! Very clever! and threw coins at me." Passers-by just assumed Mr Burpus' screams were part of the act.

 "In fact I only got free after two days,” he said later, "because a dog started licking my private parts and an old woman complained to the police."

 He went on, “They came and cut me out, but arrested me as soon as I was freed. Luckily they've now dropped the charges, and I collected over DM3,000 in my underpants, so the time wasn't entirely wasted.”



 Post script:

 I actually don't know if the Burpus story is true or not, but it did appear in several newspapers and in Private Eye magazine in Britain. Some people say it is, some that it isn't but might be based on a true incident. In any case it doesn't matter. It's a good story and it made me laugh. I hope you enjoyed it too. 


Have you had similar experiences? Send them along. Let the world know what is happening before it is too late.

Bad Luck Or Just Stupidity?

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy.”

"Success is simply a matter of luck.

Ask any failure."  Earl Wilson

There has always been a fine line between bad luck and stupidity.

I’m not even sure that there is such a thing as luck. Some people say you make your own luck and to a great extent I think I would go along with that.

There are the people who seem to have “good luck” but who are in fact people who have just had the courage and the confidence to take advantage of an opportunity when they saw one. Even lottery winners wouldn’t have won anything if they hadn’t taken the chance and bought a ticket in the first place, despite knowing that the odds were firmly against them.

Then there are the people who complain about having “bad luck” but who are in fact people who just do stupid things and when they inevitably go wrong blame bad luck instead of their own stupidity.

I had an uncle like that. All his life he kept using that saying, “If I didn’t have bad luck, I’d have no luck at all”, but the truth he was just dumb and did dumb things. I have a feeling he’ll feature in future blogs.

For now, however, we’ll use another much more famous example. If ever there was a good illustration of both good luck and bad luck wrapped up in the same person it was in a man called Roy Cleveland Sullivan.

Roy was born in Greene County, Virginia on February 7, 1912. He was described as a brawny man with a broad, rugged face, who resembled the actor Gene Hackman.

In 1936 he started working as a ranger in Shenandoah National Park in Virginina in 1936. Nothing very unusual in that, in fact a nice job if you like the outdoors and nature and all that good stuff. You could say in that regard Roy was a lucky man.

But Roy’s nickname was the "Human Lightning Conductor" or "Human Lightning Rod" because, between 1942 and 1977, he was hit by lightning on seven different occasions (unlucky) and survived all of them (lucky). For this reason he was a proud entrant in the Guinness Book of World Records as the person struck by lightning more recorded times than any other human being. Two of his ranger hats are on display at two Guinness World Exhibit Halls in New York City and in South Carolina.

The first documented lightning strike on Mr Sullivan occurred in April 1942. He was hiding from a thunderstorm in a newly built lookout tower that hadn’t yet been fitted with a lightning rod. The tower was hit seven or eight times and set on fire. Roy ran out of the tower, but just a few feet away received what he considered to be his worst lightning strike. It burned a half-inch strip all along his right leg, hit his toe, and left a hole in his shoe.

The second bolt of lightning to hit him happened in July 1969. This one was extremely unusual because he was hit while in his truck, driving on a mountain road. Normally in a lightning storm one of the safest places to be is in a vehicle, the body of a car or truck normally protects people as long as they are not touching any metal parts. In this case, however, the lightning first hit nearby trees and was deflected into the open window of the truck. The strike knocked Roy Sullivan unconscious, burned off his eyebrows, eyelashes, and most of his hair. The uncontrolled truck kept moving until it stopped near a cliff edge.

The following year, in 1970, Roy was again struck by lightning, this time while in his front yard. The lightning hit a nearby power transformer and from there jumped to his left shoulder, searing it.

The fourth strike occurred in 1972, while Roy was working inside a ranger station in Shenandoah National Park. It set his hair on fire; he tried to smother the flames with his jacket. Then he rushed to the rest room, but couldn't fit under the water tap and so used a wet towel instead.

Not unnaturally, after the fourth strike Roy began to experience a degree of paranoia and believed that some “force” was trying to destroy him and, although he had never been a timid man, he acquired a fear of death. For months, whenever he was caught in a storm while driving his truck, he would pull over and lie down on the front seat until the storm passed. He also began to carry a can of water with him and believed that he would somehow attract lightning even if he stood in a crowd of people.

On August 7, 1973, while he was out on patrol in the park, Sullivan saw a storm cloud forming and drove away quickly. But the cloud, he said later, seemed to be following him. When he finally thought he had outrun it, he decided it was safe to leave his truck. But soon after he did so – you guessed it -  he was struck by a lightning bolt. He said that on this occasion that he actually saw the bolt that hit him. The lightning set his hair on fire, moved down his left arm and left leg and knocked off his shoe, although he said “it did not untie the lace”. It then crossed over to his right leg just below the knee. Still conscious, Sullivan crawled to his truck and poured the can of water, which he always kept there, over his head.

On June 5, 1976, lightning bolt number six hit him, this time injuring his ankle. It was reported that he saw a cloud, thought that it was following him, tried to run away, but was struck anyway.

On Saturday morning, June 25, 1977, Sullivan was fishing in a freshwater pool when he was struck for the seventh time. The lightning hit the top of his head, singeing his hair, and traveled down burning his chest and stomach. Sullivan turned to his car and then another unexpected thing happened — a bear appeared and tried to steal trout from his fishing line. Sullivan had the strength and courage to strike the bear with a tree branch. He claimed that this was the twenty-second time he hit a bear with a stick in his lifetime.

All seven strikes were documented by the superintendent of Shenandoah National Park, R. Taylor Hoskins, and were verified by doctors. Sullivan himself recalled that the first time he was struck by lightning was not in 1942 but much earlier. When he was a child, he was helping his father to cut wheat in a field, when a thunderbolt struck the blade of his scythe without injuring him, but because he could not prove the fact later, he never claimed it in his total.

Roy Sullivan's wife was also struck once, when a storm suddenly arrived as she was out hanging clothes in their back yard. Yes, her husband Roy was helping her at the time, but this time he escaped unharmed.

Understandably in later in life Roy was avoided by people because of their fear of being hit by lightning, a fact that he said saddened him. He once recalled "For instance, I was walking with the chief ranger one day when lightning struck way off. The chief said, 'I'll see you later.'"

So, ‘bad luck’ to have been hit so many times by lightning or ‘good luck’ to have survived them all, take you pick.

Unfortunately the story doesn’t have a happy ending. On September 28, 1983, Roy Sullivan died at the age of 71 from self-inflicted gunshot wound over an unrequited love. It is not know whether the love was unrequited because the other party did not have the same feelings for Roy or whether they just feared getting hit by lightning!

 - - - - - - -

There is a similar tale about a British cavalry officer, a Major Summerford, who was fighting in the fields of Flanders during the last year of WW1, when a flash of lightning knocked him off his horse and paralysed him from his waist down.

Summerford moved to Vancouver, Canada, and six years later, whilst out fishing, he was again struck by lightning, this time paralysing the right side of his body.

After two years of recovery, one summer day he was out in a local park, when a storm suddenly blew up and Major Summerfield was again struck by lightning. This time he was permanently paralysed.

He died two years after this incident.

Four years after his death, his stone tomb was destroyed.

Yes, it was struck by lightning!

- - - - - - -

All a bit too morbid? Maybe we need to end on something a bit more light hearted. As “luck” would have it I remember a suitable (and clean) story. It’s a little bit funny, I hope.

Anthony S. Clancy of Dublin, was born on the seventh day of the seventh month of the seventh year of the century, which also happened to be the seventh day of the week.

He was the seventh child of a seventh child, and he had seven brothers

That makes seven sevens.

On his twenty-seventh birthday he went to the race track.

The seventh numbered horse in the seventh race was named Seventh Heaven, and was handicapped seven stone.

The odds against Seventh Heaven were seven-to-one.

Clancy bet seven shillings anyway.

You guessed it, Seventh Heaven finished seventh!