Masturbation Joke didn't trip the Amazon auto-censor.

Sometimes, as a guy, there are times when you only need to moisturize one hand. When that need arises, you need a lotion that can do the job. It can’t absorb into your skin too fast, nor can it be to oily.

By those criteria, this lotion works well for moisturizing your dominate hand. Where it falls short is in scent. I don’t know what toiletry companies think guys want to smell like, but this has the scent of that generic fresh scent that is plugged into so many toiletries; a scent that has no obvious analogue in nature. It smells like locker rooms

The problem is also in the name. Sometimes you don’t want everyone to know that you were moisturizing your dominate hand while your significant other ran to the drugstore. That’s why the idea of a lotion with “Light” scent is so enticing. It should create a moist hand with just the subtle hint of scent.

This lotion fails – the Light scent fills the room, and everyone knows you have a moist hand. In this context, the lotion is a failure. Move on and buy something else.


From: http://www.amazon.com/review/R2SI7ULBD3OWYK/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

All war books are anti-war books: Reading Tardi and Verney's "Goddamn This War!"

My library had this on the new release shelf, and my interest in picture books and the great war together made me pick this up.

It tells the story of an unnamed soldier from the start to the end of the war.  Like most of narratives I've read of soldiers at the time, it suffers from the inertia that was a by-product of the war's greater narrative.  Once dug-in, there wasn't much movement.  I think of it as a continent-wide siege.

The art is successful.  The authors use the palate to really set the mood - dropping color off in the trenches to show the gray drabness of that reality.    It looks good too, without being overly gruesome.  There is one particularly haunting picture that makes the cover and is even 'better' in context, the soldier with the medal pinned to his pillow.

Finally, what is particularly important in the book is that the story of the one soldier is generalized, there is a Europe-centric history of the war for the last 30 pages or so.  This year-by-year chronology of the larger events gives more context to the singular experience that the art section of the book conveys.  I enjoyed reading the history almost as much as I did reading the individualized story in the drawn section. 

Reading Csikszenthihaly

I had seen this book referenced in some other books and I thought I would go to the source. 

It is an interesting book, but the structure and style of the author's sentences make it hard to read at times.  The reading of the book doesn't, well, Flow.  (The joke here being that flow in the sense of the ease of reading and the namesake state of being are probably both separate and the same thing.)

My preconceived notion of what "Flow" is tracked closely with what they call when athletes are "in the zone" and why I have come closest to in practice, where you just turn off your conscious mind and react through muscle memory.  I was pretty close, but my notion was more limited.  For the author, you can have flow at work, which to me seems ludicrous at first blush but is true.  I can think of personal experiences where I was making pizza years ago, and in explaining how well I worked with one coworker, I called it a "dance". I didn't always dance at that job, but when I did, it was beautiful -- time flew and the memory of the shift was a pleasant memory.

You don't always flow though, and that's what concerns me.  The author shows all these people experiencing these states, but I am wanting to know how to create these states.  Reading the book, an d explaining it to my wife, she asked if it was a 'self-help' book with the negative baggage that comes with that phrase.  It is not, but I for one wanted more hint on how to get to there from here. 

One big thing about reading this for me was that it needs updated and expanded (and I'm sure the work has bee furthered).  It is a twenty + year old book and the research it is based on is even older.  I would be interested in seeing the physiological reaction to flow.  Can you throw someone in an fMRI machine and induce the fl,ow state?  If so, we could see in a different manner what a flow state looks like.