:: The Wendy House ::

Today I am focussing all my emotional energy on striving to achieve the dizziest heights of most strikingly ordinariness.  The cats have already fallen into snore-laden sleep. 

I’ll let you kno ho it goes, though it ont be anything special, so maybe I ont let you kno ho it goes.   e’ll see if its orthy,  after a bout of affly indecisveness of extremely ordinary proportions and hacking my mini-hammer on the wwwwww key.

Red excitedness characteristics:

• falling over.  Think or how the USS enterprise wobbles and throws the crew from side to side when attacked by the klingons or travelling through an asteroid belt.
• dribbling.  Pouring tea becomes particularly tricky leaving drips all over the place.
• Perpetual waffling. A striking lack of precision in speach and writing rather like rambing only not in the countryside but in words and really not worthy of reading. Editor skills are desperately needed during a red alert to head-off the waffle effect.
• tears before bedtime. Over spilt tea,  bruised knees, being misunderstood etc

Why now?

Only 4 weeks before my Greek sailing holiday!  I’ve made the lists & purchased the essentials.  From here-on in its all about getting over-excited. 

Amber excitedness characteristics:

• unpredictable outbreaks of persistent smiling.
• mugs of undrunk tea appearing around the house because I’ve forgotten that I have already made myself a cup of tea.
• frequent brief outbursts of hyper-inactivity.  Sitting-still to enjoy thinking about whatever I’m getting excited about.
• increased incidences of burbling.

Why now?

This year I’ll be sailing to half a dozen or so Islands in Greece with 7 strangers and a friend for 10 days on a 50ft yaught.  The trip bochure tells me that  Hemingway ‘Would have’ turned up at the Island of Sifnos,  that we can visit the Kitron Brewery on Naxos.  All over the Islands we can admire ancient architecture,  visit Churches, Temples and many many Tavernas.  Snorkling, dolphins and beaches are also mentioned.   

OooOoOOooOoOoOOoOoHHHHHHHHHhhhhhhhh

the Ray Bans are out!

Waffle Warning

dichotomy in the universe of closed questions

a ‘closed question’ is a question that has a specific answer,  answers like:

• yes please!
• Oskaloosa in Kansas
• 43
• 2 pints of real Ale
• Bling

Lets suppose that in the universe of possible questions there are an infinitie number of closed questions. 

What is the dichotomy in the universe of closed questions?  The dichotomy is between questions that can be answered ‘no’ such as  ‘Wendy,  do you live in an igloo?’,  and questions that can be answered ‘yes’ such as “Wendy do you live in a wooden house?”  Tonight’s beer-induced Wendy-epiphany is that this dichotomy of closed questions may not be equally populated.  I suspect that there are more possible questions to which the answer is ‘no’ than there are questions to which the answer is ‘yes’.  This suspicion is based on the following preliminary analysis:

Take this question structure as an example:  “Wendy, do you live in a  [insert word here]?”

If the inserted word is a physical home-type without counting all possible insertions I am estimating that the answer is more often No than Yes. 

Example physical home-type:  house, bungalo, igloo, TeePee, tent, hotel, skyscraper, apartment, condominium, flat, tree, bath, lake, road 

If the inserted word is some other plausible descriptor of living conditions I suspect there is still an obvious weighting towards no over yes.   

Example plausible descriptor:  mess, illusion, happy place, circus, bubble, dream, fantasy

If the inserted word is not plausible the answer is most likely to be no

Example not-plausible words: pin, parrot, toe-nail, bling, 43

There are more no than yes answers in the range of possible answers.  People tend to produce ‘yes’ answers,  it’s been studied by psychologists so that they can create and understand the results of questionnaires.  Since people tend (bias?) to agree, to provide ‘yes’ answers,  the tendancy has been given the fancy name of  ‘acquiescence bias’.    

People, not psychonlogists, use skill and prior knowledge to help raise the baseline for the production of ‘yes’ answers above that which would be predicted by either a

• model that assumes the answers produced are a proportionally representative subset of all possible answers (More ‘No’ responses), or 
• counter-balanced  (half no, half yes) answers approach normally used in questionnaire design to ‘control’ the bias.  

Some people, and psychologists, are so cunning they minimize asking questions that can be answered no and can effectively use this acquiescence bias to move towards, and gain, a concensus.  People are wonderfully clever like that;  giving each other the opportunity to say yes.

I really like questions where the answer is ‘yes’,  I’ll leave you with this example:

“Wendy would you like another beer?”

Waffle warning over 

Which really means:

8 reasons why Wendy didn’t read a blog

together, these reasons have prevented me reading blogs that may have outstanding content… …but I’ll never know:

1. poor publicity:  I don’t know that the blog exists,  its contents never show up in any of my internet searches,  there are no links to it in other stuff that I read, none of my friends told me about it.
2. foriegn language:  I know it exists but I can’t read it because the language is too foriegn. For example,  German,  Instant Message or phone-text message style abbreviations like “u shud cuz u r kewl“. 
3. personally irrelevant: I know it exists, I can read the language, but the blog content does not provide anything clearly relevant to my life. For example,  a blog on standard poodles.
4. offensive message:   I know it exists, I can read the language, the content is relevant to my life but the message is fundamentally offensive. 
5. squinting required:  either the text is so small that I have to squint to read, there is a low contrast between the text and the background,  the spacing between the text lines is so small it’s difficult to visually follow one line.  I can’t read it without changing my preferred browser text-size that works for most other web pages.
6. witless: If a blog lacks wit, I stop reading it. I like to learn something or laugh,  ideally both at the same time.  Double whammy!
7. lacking illustrative pictures:  Too much text can make my head spin,  then I fall over. Breaking the stream of text, regularly, with pictures that illustrate the message helps prevent me falling over.  It’s not essential,  but it helps.
8. scrolling required*:  I’m too attentionally challenged to regularly read blog posts that are long enough to require scrolling the window,  especially if they don’t include pictures.  Again,  not essential,  but it helps keep my reading regular..

Apart from including an illustrative picture, what have I missed that is important to you?

* I write scrollable blog posts. My excuse is that I’m endearingly waffly rather than perfectly precise.   

overheard phrase:

’so I was manually trying to delete 3 binaries from the drive’

wendy-ist deconstruction:

• so = popular US phrase opener that appears be shorthand for ‘this is what happened next’ 
• manually = an unoffensive gender biased word that appears to mean not using any fancy tools.  rather than ‘men not using fancy tools’.
• delete = software technical jargon for ‘remove’
• binaries = things that can only have two states, like ‘true’ or ‘false’ rather then having a continuum of existence or any form or ambiguity. 
• drive = some computer part,  not something that you do in your car

phrase recast to wendy world:

‘this is what happened next i was not using any fancy tools to remove 3 things that can only have two states from some computer part.

born to waffle,  that’s me!

“Does it work?” asked a colleage.

Wendy:  Well,  yes it ‘works’,  but there are lots of little problems that if you don’t already know what to do means that you can’t actually use it.

colleague: (laughs) She’s so tactful.  It doesn’t work.

Wendy:  we know the little problems and we’re going to fix them so it works but you can’t use it,  you will be able to use it, if you know the problems,  and when they’re fixed you’ll be able to use it without knowing the problems

colleague:  it doesn’t work now,  it will work WHEN?

Wendy:  I’ll get back to you with an estimated date

Wendy waffles,  I always will.  It’s part of who I am. I like to think of it as ‘disambiguation’.  Mainly because ‘disambiguation is such a fabulous word. 

Say disambiguation 3 times every night before turning the lights out and you’ll get a feel for what I really mean.  Beer helps you get your tongue around it.  Doesn’t it always? 

does ‘The Wendy House’ need re-branding with a name that is sweeter,  more American, and refers to the rambling content?  For example: