1966 Chrysler New Yorker-Barn Find! - $1800 (Tyler, TX)
Date: 2011-05-20, 10:08PM CDT
Reply to: sale-zzsmt-2393651558@craigslist.org [Errors when replying to ads?]
1966 Chrysler New Yorker classic, one previous owner with 33,000 original miles. This car is fully loaded with a running 440 engine, auto transmission, AC, am radio, electric seats and windows. With a little TLC it could be a daily driver. Call Bobby 903-530-0649
- Location: Tyler, TX
- it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
Monday, May 23, 2011
1966 Chrysler New Yorker-Barn Find! Very cool car...someone should buy this!
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Advice to my daughter « Jodie Odie Via Alexis Bright
The other day my beautiful 15 year old daughter asked me for some general advice on life. Luckily I was prepared for this moment – for years I had been writing down thoughts that occurred to me to tell her. This is the compilation:
Cooking something savory and want to add some veggies: Carrot, Celery and Onion.
Beware anyone who asks questions where you can’t answer “no”.
Have enough water. Have enough fun. Have enough sleep.
Beware people bearing surprise gifts that aren’t beautiful or useful.
If a boy/girl doesn’t call, forget it. You can find someone who will.
Ditch the levelers. They put you down to feel better. They suck.
Don’t worry about being the best. It’s really really really unlikely. Just do your thing. The world still benefits!
Marry someone who makes you smile. That’s a recipe for a good life.
Don’t panic if your life partner shits you sometimes. That’s normal. Marriage is about averages – if on the whole your life is better for them being there, that’s good!
When you are procrastinating, maybe the job is too big. Find a tiny bit of the job and do that.
95% of beauty is carriage. Stand tall and move with pride.
You cannot trust one word from an addict’s mouth. Ignore this at your peril.
Don’t give away YES’s easy. Agree to do stuff you are happy to.
Dragging out the boring stuff is crap. Chores – get in, do them just well enough, get out.
Credit is the party, debt is the hangover. And baby, this hangover can go on for DECADES. Be smart. NO CASH, NO BUY.
Stuff doesn’t make you happy. Ads manipulate you to buy stuff you don’t want.
High Status doesn’t make you happy, just lonely and unsatisfied
If you have a book in you, FOR GOD’S SAKE WRITE IT.
Don’t let the washing up get away from you. Sufficient unto the day is the washing up there in.
You probably can’t change other people.
A boy/girl who is wild and exciting will break your heart. But you’ll have a fun time first.
If you want to have sex with someone, go for it. Use a condom and have some fun. Also if you don’t want to do, then don’t. (Women fought so hard for the right for no to mean no under any circumstances. It’s your right.)
Psychologists have discovered kindness is the secret to happiness.
If you find a boy/girl who will do anything for you, don’t become high maintenance just because they’ll take it. Shameful behavior.
Remember to fuck shit up a little bit. Sometimes it’s important to stick it to the man just because rebellion keeps you young – it’s the sauce of life though – keep it in balance.
Don’t argue with the police. Be polite and don’t give them any more info than they ask for. (In fact same goes for anyone with a gun!)
Women can lose valuable life energy feeling that they are not attractive enough. No one will judge your looks as harshly as you do. Most people wont care what you look like and people who love you will think you have the most wonderful face on the planet.
Social elegance means making other people feel comfortable and welcome. It’s not about fancy place settings on tables. Real grace never goes out of style.
Some people who just don’t get it, are doing the best they can. They aren’t trying to be annoying – that’s just the way they are
Most stuff that happens has nothing to do with you. It just feels like it does. Even the way people treat you generally has very little to do with you.
Your gut knows. Gut instinct is a safety device.
Do your thing – follow your calling. In the end people can spend a lot of time worrying about whether or not they can earn money following their calling. Just do your thing. Pay the bills. If they coincide great. If they remain separate – that’s OK!
Sleep is essential to health. Anyone who tries to convince you that you don’t need to sleep is wrong. And you must wonder why they are spinning shit at you.
You will lose friends if you flirt with their boyfriends/husbands/lovers. Learn how to treat these people appropriately. You can absolutely control the signals you give out.
Walking. Hallelujah.
Buy good shoes. If your feet hurt you are stuck.
There are some people who are very successful in life – not through talent but through wheeling and dealing. It’s a good idea to keep your distance from these people, because they will use you to get ahead, in whatever way they need. On the other hand every now and then you need to be a little bit strategic yourself. People who believe all you need to do is be good, work hard and follow the rules and the universe will notice, care and reward them often end up burnt out and bitter. So you can learn something from observing these folks from a safe distance!
The grass is greener where you water it. If you neglect something it can be crap. It’s amazing what five minutes a day for a week can do for a neglected thing!
Not all drugs are the same and not all people are the same. Some drugs are much more addictive than others. And some people are more likely to become addicted than others. Alcohol, tobacco, heroin and ice are addictive. Stay away from speed. I’ve met too many speed freaks in my life – and they are screwy. Be careful with alcohol because it’s legal and most people drink, you can slide into an addiction without realizing.
When you’ve given too much to other people you are spent. The solution is simple. Be selfish for a while.
Be careful of dodgy seafood.
When you start at a new job or organisation of some sort, just sit back and get the vibe for a few months. Don’t go too berserk.
Work places don’t offer love. They take whatever you give, and give you a paycheck. Make sure you don’t give too much to work.
Your children’s grandparents are there to help. They took that job on when they had you. Never be ashamed to ask them for help.
Take cuppas seriously. Tea bags and instant coffee are an insult to civility. If you can’t make time for a proper cuppa then life is wrong and you need to fix it.
When you want something from other people the more you use humor the better negotiations will go.
As far as I can make out current post modernism is comprehensively stupid. But I suspect Foucault had some really good things to say.
Don’t Fuck with Centrelink. They put people in jail.
Remember how wealthy you are. Be grateful for the great work of generations and generations of humanity that have brought us to this place. safe drinking water on tap. Free health care. Suffrage. decent state provided primary secondary and tertiary education. The Internet!!! Electricity. Equal pay. Medicine. No one shooting at us. Shops brimming with beautiful, healthy food. Libraries. Civil liberties. Ladders. washing machines. pegs. clothes hangers. Bricks. toilets. Immunization. Language, poetry, literature. music music music. Bridges – we’d notice if they weren’t there!
Your dad is a really good man, and he’ll always look out for you.
How to spot a psychopath | Jon Ronson - Fascinating
It was visiting hour at Broadmoor psychiatric hospital and patients began drifting in to sit with their loved ones at tables and chairs that had been fixed to the ground. They were mostly overweight, wearing loose, comfortable T-shirts and elasticated sweatpants. There probably wasn't much to do in Broadmoor but eat. I wondered if any of them were famous. Broadmoor was where they sent Ian Brady, the Moors murderer, and Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper.
- The Psychopath Test
- by Jon Ronson
- Buy it from the Guardian bookshop
A man in his late 20s walked towards me. His arm was outstretched. He wasn't wearing sweatpants. He was wearing a pinstripe jacket and trousers. He looked like a young businessman trying to make his way in the world, someone who wanted to show everyone that he was very, very sane. We shook hands.
"I'm Tony," he said. He sat down.
"So I hear you faked your way in here," I said.
"That's exactly right," Tony said.
He had the voice of a normal, nice, eager-to-help young man.
"I'd committed GBH," he said. "After they arrested me, I sat in my cell and I thought, 'I'm looking at five to seven years.' So I asked the other prisoners what to do. They said, 'Easy! Tell them you're mad! They'll put you in a county hospital. You'll have Sky TV and a PlayStation. Nurses will bring you pizzas.'"
"How long ago was this?" I asked.
"Twelve years ago," Tony said.
Tony said faking madness was the easy part, especially when you're 17 and you take drugs and watch a lot of scary movies. You don't need to know how authentically crazy people behave. You just plagiarise the character Dennis Hopper played in the movie Blue Velvet. That's what Tony did. He told a visiting psychiatrist he liked sending people love letters straight from his heart, and a love letter was a bullet from a gun, and if you received a love letter from him, you'd go straight to hell.
Plagiarising a well-known movie was a gamble, he said, but it paid off. Lots more psychiatrists began visiting his cell. He broadened his repertoire to include bits from Hellraiser, A Clockwork Orange and David Cronenberg's Crash. Tony told the psychiatrists he liked to crash cars into walls for sexual pleasure and also that he wanted to kill women because he thought looking into their eyes as they died would make him feel normal.
"Where did you get that one from?" I asked.
"A biography of Ted Bundy," Tony replied. "I found it in the prison library."
I nodded and thought it probably wasn't a great idea for prison libraries to stock books about Ted Bundy.
"But they didn't send me to some cushy hospital," Tony continued. "They sent me to bloody Broadmoor!"
Tony said the day he arrived at the dangerous and severe personality disorder (DSPD) unit, he took one look at the place and realised he'd made a spectacularly bad decision. He asked to speak urgently to psychiatrists. "I'm not mentally ill," he told them. It is an awful lot harder, Tony told me, to convince people you're sane than it is to convince them you're crazy.
"When you decided to wear pinstripe to meet me," I said, "did you realise the look could go either way?"
"Yes," said Tony, "but I thought I'd take my chances. Plus most of the patients here are disgusting slobs who don't wash or change their clothes for weeks on end and I like to dress well."
I looked around the Wellness Centre at the patients, scoffing chocolate bars with their parents who, in contrast to their children, had made a great effort to dress well.
"I know people are looking out for 'nonverbal clues' to my mental state," Tony continued. "Psychiatrists love 'nonverbal clues'. They love to analyse body movements. But that's really hard for the person who is trying to act sane. How do you sit in a sane way? How do you cross your legs in a sane way?"
I suddenly felt self-conscious. Was I crossing my legs like a journalist?
"So for a while you thought that being normal and polite would be your ticket out of here?" I said.
"Right," he replied. "I volunteered to weed the hospital garden. But they saw how well behaved I was and decided it meant I could behave well only in the environment of a psychiatric hospital and it proved I was mad."
I glanced suspiciously at Tony. I instinctively didn't believe him about this. It seemed too catch-22, too darkly-absurd-by-numbers. But later Tony sent me his files and, sure enough, it was right there. "Tony is cheerful and friendly," one report stated. "His detention in hospital is preventing deterioration of his condition."
After Tony read that, he said, he started a kind of war of non co-operation. This involved staying in his room a lot. On the outside, Tony said, not wanting to spend time with your criminally insane neighbours would be a perfectly understandable position. But on the inside it demonstrates you're withdrawn and have a grandiose sense of your own importance. In Broadmoor, not wanting to hang out with insane killers is a sign of madness.
"The patient's behaviour is getting worse in Broadmoor," a report written during Tony's non co-operation period stated. "He does not engage [with other patients]."
Tony was funny and quite charming for most of my two hours with him, but towards the end he got sadder. "I arrived here when I was 17," he said. "I'm 29 now. I've grown up wandering the wards of Broadmoor. I've got the Stockwell strangler on one side of me and the Tiptoe Through The Tulips rapist on the other. These are supposed to be the best years of your life. I've seen suicides. I saw a man take another man's eye out."
Tony said just being there can be enough to turn someone crazy. Then one of the guards called out a word – "Time" – and with barely a goodbye, Tony shot from the table and across the room. All the patients did the same. It was a display of tremendous, extreme, acute good behaviour.
I didn't know what to think. Unlike the sad-eyed, medicated patients all around us, Tony had seemed perfectly ordinary and sane. But what did I know?
The next day I wrote to Professor Anthony Maden, the head clinician at Tony's unit at Broadmoor – "I'm contacting you in the hope that you may be able to shed some light on how true Tony's story might be."
A few days later a letter arrived from Tony. "This place is awful at night-time, Jon," he wrote. "Words cannot express the atmosphere."
Tony had included in the package copies of his files. So I got to read the exact words he used to convince psychiatrists back in 1998 that he was mentally ill. He'd really gone to town. He said the CIA was following him, that he enjoyed taking things that belonged to other people because he liked the idea of making them suffer, and that hurting people was better than sex.
I felt the ground shift under my feet. Suddenly I was a little on the side of the psychiatrists. Tony must have come over as extremely creepy.
There was also a description of the crime he committed in 1997. The victim was a homeless alcoholic called Graham who apparently made "an inappropriate comment" about the 10-year-old daughter of one of Tony's friends; something to do with the length of her dress. Tony told him to shut up. Graham threw a punch. Tony retaliated by kicking him. Graham fell over. And that would have been it – Tony later said – had Graham stayed silent. But Graham said, "Is that all you've got?"
Tony "flipped". He kicked Graham seven or eight times in the stomach and groin, returning later to kick him again. I remembered that list of movies Tony said he plagiarised to demonstrate he was mentally ill. A Clockwork Orange begins with a gang of thugs kicking a homeless man while he is on the ground.
My phone rang. I recognised the number. It was Tony. I didn't answer.
A week passed and then the email I had been waiting for arrived from Professor Maden.
"Tony," it read, "did get here by faking mental illness because he thought it would be preferable to prison."
"Oh!" I thought, pleasantly surprised. "Good! That's great!"
But then I read Maden's next line: "Most psychiatrists who have assessed him, and there have been a lot, have considered he is not mentally ill, but suffers from psychopathy."
I looked at the email. "Tony's a psychopath?" I thought.
I didn't know very much about psychopaths back then, but I did know this: it sounded worse.
Faking mental illness to get out of a prison sentence, Maden explained, is exactly the kind of deceitful and manipulative act you'd expect of a psychopath.
A psychologist friend, Essi Viding, agreed. "Classic psychopath!" she said when I described Tony's pinstripe suit.
Tony rang again. I took a breath and picked up the phone.
"Jon?" he said. He sounded small and far away and echoey.
"Yes, hello, Tony," I said, in a no-nonsense way.
"I haven't heard from you in a while," he said.
"Professor Maden says you're a psychopath," I said.
Tony exhaled, impatiently. "I'm not a psychopath," he said.
"How do you know?" I asked.
"They say psychopaths can't feel remorse," said Tony. "I feel lots of remorse. But when I tell them I feel remorse, they say psychopaths pretend to be remorseful when they're not. Trying to prove you're not a psychopath is even harder than trying to prove you're not mentally ill."
"How did they diagnose you?" I asked.
"They give you a psychopath test," said Tony. "The Robert Hare Checklist. They assess you for 20 personality traits. Superficial charm. Proneness to boredom. Lack of empathy. Lack of remorse. Grandiose sense of self-worth. That sort of thing. For each one they score you a 0, 1 or 2. If your total score is 30 or more out of 40, you're a psychopath. That's it. You're doomed. You're labelled a psychopath for life. They say you can't change. You can't be treated. You're a danger to society. And then you're stuck somewhere like this."
It was the French psychiatrist Philippe Pinel who first suggested, early in the 19th century, that there was a madness that didn't involve mania or depression or psychosis. He called it "manie sans d̩lire" Рinsanity without delusions. He said sufferers appeared normal on the surface, but they lacked impulse controls and were prone to outbursts of violence. It wasn't until 1891, when the German doctor JLA Koch published his book Die Psychopathischen Minderwertigkeiten, that it got its name: psychopathy.
The consensus from the beginning was that only 1% of humans had it, but the chaos they caused was so far-reaching, it could actually remould society. And so the urgent question became, how could psychopaths be cured?
In the late 1960s, a young Canadian psychiatrist believed he had the answer. His name was Elliott Barker and he had visited radical therapeutic communities around the world, including nude psychotherapy sessions occurring under the tutelage of an American psychotherapist named Paul Bindrim. Clients, mostly California free-thinkers and movie stars, would sit naked in a circle and dive headlong into a 24-hour emotional and mystical rollercoaster during which participants would scream and yell and sob and confess their innermost fears. Barker worked at a unit for psychopaths inside the Oak Ridge hospital for the criminally insane in Ontario. Although the inmates were undoubtedly insane, they seemed perfectly ordinary. This, Barker deduced, was because they were burying their insanity deep beneath a facade of normality. If the madness could only, somehow, be brought to the surface, maybe it would work itself through and they could be reborn as empathetic human beings.
And so he successfully sought permission from the Canadian government to obtain a large batch of LSD, hand-picked a group of psychopaths, led them into what he named the "total encounter capsule", a small room painted bright green, and asked them to remove their clothes. This was truly to be a radical milestone: the world's first ever marathon nude LSD-fuelled psychotherapy session for criminal psychopaths.
Barker's sessions lasted for epic 11-day stretches. There were no distractions – no television, no clothes, no clocks, no calendars, only a perpetual discussion (at least 100 hours every week) of their feelings. Much like Bindrim's sessions, the psychopaths were encouraged to go to their rawest emotional places by screaming and clawing at the walls and confessing fantasies of forbidden sexual longing for each other, even if they were, in the words of an internal Oak Ridge report of the time, "in a state of arousal while doing so".
My guess is that this would have been a more enjoyable experience within the context of a Palm Springs resort hotel than in a secure facility for psychopathic murderers.
Barker watched it all from behind a one-way mirror and his early reports were gloomy. The atmosphere inside the capsule was tense. Psychopaths would stare angrily at each other. Days would go by when nobody would exchange a word. But then, as the weeks turned into months, something unexpected began to happen.
The transformation was captured in an incredibly moving film. These tough young prisoners are, before our eyes, changing. They are learning to care for one another inside the capsule.
We see Barker in his office, and the look of delight on his face is quite heartbreaking. His psychopaths have become gentle. Some are even telling their parole boards not to consider them for release until after they've completed their therapy. The authorities are astonished.
Back home in London, I felt terribly sorry for Tony. So many psychopathic murderers – fortunate to have been under Barker's radical tutelage – had been declared cured and freed. Why couldn't Broadmoor adopt some of his ideas? Of course, they seemed dated and naive and perhaps overly reliant on hallucinogenics, but they were surely preferable to locking someone up for ever because he happened to score badly on some personality checklist.
Then I learned that two researchers had in the early 90s undertaken a detailed study of the long-term recidivism rates of psychopaths who'd been through Barker's programme and let out into society. In regular circumstances, 60% of criminal psychopaths released into the outside world go on to reoffend. What percentage of their psychopaths had? As it turned out: 80%.
The capsule had made the psychopaths worse.
"They had psychopaths naked and talking about their feelings!" Bob Hare laughed, shaking his head at the idealism of it all. It was an August evening and we were drinking in a hotel bar in rural Pembrokeshire, west Wales, at one of Hare's three-day residential courses for psychiatrists, care workers and criminal profilers. It was exciting finally to meet him. While names such as Elliott Barker have all but faded away, Hare is influential. Justice departments and parole boards all over the world have accepted his contention that psychopaths are quite simply incurable and everyone should concentrate their energies instead on learning how to root them out using his PCL-R (Psychopathy Checklist-Revised), which he has spent a lifetime refining.
In the mid-60s, Hare was working as a prison psychologist in Vancouver. He put word around the prison that he was looking for psychopathic and non-psychopathic volunteers for tests. He strapped them up to various EEG and sweat- and blood pressure-measuring machines, and also to an electricity generator, and explained to them that he was going to count backwards from 10 and when he reached one they'd receive a very painful electric shock.
The difference in the responses stunned Hare. The non-psychopathic volunteers (theirs were crimes of passion, usually, or crimes born from terrible poverty or abuse) steeled themselves ruefully, as if a painful electric shock were just the penance they deserved. They were, Hare noted, scared.
"And the psychopaths?" I asked.
"They didn't break a sweat," said Hare. "Nothing." The tests seemed to indicate that the amygdala, the part of the brain that should have anticipated the unpleasantness and sent the requisite signals of fear to the central nervous system, wasn't functioning as it should. It was an enormous breakthrough for Hare, his first clue that the brains of psychopaths were different from regular brains.
He was even more astonished when he repeated the test. This time, the psychopaths knew exactly how much pain they'd be in, and still: nothing. Hare learned something that others wouldn't for years: psychopaths were likely to reoffend. "They had no memory of the pain of the electric shock, even when the pain had occurred just moments before," Hare said. "So what's the point in threatening them with imprisonment if they break the terms of their parole? The threat has no meaning for them."
He did another experiment, the startle reflex test, in which psychopaths and non-psychopaths were invited to look at grotesque images, such as crime-scene photographs of blown-apart faces, and when they least expected it Hare would let off an incredibly loud noise in their ear. The non-psychopaths would leap with astonishment. The psychopaths would remain comparatively serene.
Hare knew that we tend to jump a lot higher when startled if we're on the edge of our seats anyway. But if we're engrossed by something, a crossword puzzle, say, and someone startles us, our leap is less pronounced. From this Hare deduced that when psychopaths see grotesque images of blown-apart faces they aren't horrified. They're absorbed.
Thrilled by his findings, Hare sent them to Science magazine.
"The editor returned them unpublished," he said. "He wrote, 'Frankly we found some of the brain wave patterns depicted in your paper very odd. Those EEGs couldn't have come from real people.'"
Then, disastrously for Hare, electric shocks were outlawed in the early 70s. He was forced to change tack. How could psychopaths be rooted out in a more hands-off way? In 1975 he organised a conference on the subject, so experts could pool their observations on the minutiae of psychopaths' behaviour, the verbal and non-verbal tics. Were there patterns? Did they involuntarily use giveaway turns of phrase? Their conclusions became the basis for his now-famous 20-point Hare PCL-R . Which was this:
Item 1 Glibness/superficial charm
Item 2 Grandiose sense of self-worth
Item 3 Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom
Item 4 Pathological lying
Item 5 Cunning/manipulative
Item 6 Lack of remorse or guilt
Item 7 Shallow affect
Item 8 Callous/lack of empathy
Item 9 Parasitic lifestyle
Item 10 Poor behavioural controls
Item 11 Promiscuous sexual behaviour
Item 12 Early behaviour problems
Item 13 Lack of realistic long-term goals
Item 14 Impulsivity
Item 15 Irresponsibility
Item 16 Failure to accept responsibility for own actions
Item 17 Many short-term marital relationships
Item 18 Juvenile delinquency
Item 19 Revocation of conditional release
Item 20 Criminal versatility
Hare said if he were to score himself either 0, 1 or 2 on each item of his checklist, he'd probably get a four or a five out of the possible 40. Tony in Broadmoor had told me that on the three occasions they scored him, he got around a 29 or a 30.
Over the three-day course in Wales, my scepticism drained away entirely and I became a Hare devotee. I think the other sceptics felt the same. He was very convincing. I was attaining a new power, like a secret weapon. I felt like a different person, a hardliner, not confused or out of my depth as I had been when I'd been hanging around with Tony in Broadmoor. Instead, I was contemptuous of those naive people who allowed themselves to be taken in by slick-tongued psychopaths.
My mind drifted to what I could do with my new powers. If I'm being honest, it didn't cross my mind to become some kind of great crime fighter, philanthropically dedicated to making society a safer place. Instead, I made a mental list of all the people who over the years had crossed me and wondered which of them I might be able to expose as having psychopathic character traits. Top of the list was AA Gill, who had always been very rude about my television documentaries and had written a restaurant column in which he admitted to killing a baboon on safari.
"Item 8 Callous/lack of empathy," I thought, and smiled to myself.
After the conference, though, Hare seemed introspective. He said, almost to himself, "I shouldn't have done my research just in prisons. I should have spent some time inside the Stock Exchange as well."
"But surely stock-market psychopaths can't be as bad as serial-killer psychopaths," I said.
"Serial killers ruin families," shrugged Hare. "Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies."
It wasn't only Hare who believed that a disproportionate number of psychopaths can be found in high places. Over the following months, I spoke to scores of psychologists who all said the same. Everyone in the field seemed to regard psychopaths in this same way: inhuman, relentlessly wicked forces, whirlwinds of malevolence, forever harming society but impossible to identify unless you're trained in the subtle art of spotting them, as I now was.
I met an American CEO, Al Dunlap, formerly of the Sunbeam Corporation, who redefined a great many of the psychopath traits to me as "business positives": Grandiose sense of self-worth? "You've got to believe in yourself." (As he told me this, he was standing underneath a giant oil painting of himself.) Cunning/manipulative? "That's leadership."
But I became incredibly disappointed whenever Dunlap said things to me that were reasonable. There had been – he swore – no early behavioural problems or juvenile delinquency: "I was a focused, serious kid. In school I was always trying to achieve." And he had a loyal wife of 41 years. There were no rumours of affairs. This would score him a zero on items 17 and 11: many short-term marital relationships, and promiscuous sexual behaviour.
Becoming a psychopath-spotter had turned me power-crazed and a bit psychopathic. I was starting to see the checklist as an intoxicating weapon that was capable of inflicting terrible damage if placed in the wrong hands. And I was beginning to suspect that my hands might be the wrong hands.
I met up with Hare again. "It's quite a power you bestow upon people," I said. "What if you've created armies of people who spot psychopaths where there are none, witchfinder generals of the psychopath-spotting world?"
There was a silence.
"I do worry about the checklist being misused," Hare said.
"Who misuses it?" I asked.
"Over here, you have your DSPD programme," he said.
"That's where my friend Tony is," I said. "The DSPD unit at Broadmoor."
Two years had passed since I'd first met Tony in Broadmoor. I hadn't heard from him in months, and then out of the blue he called.
"Jon!" he said. He sounded excited. "There's going to be a tribunal. I want you to come. As my guest."
"Ah," I said, trying to sound pleased for him. Tony was forever pushing for tribunals, year after year, for the 14 years he had been inside Broadmoor's DSPD unit. His optimism was tireless. But the outcome was always the same. They'd come to nothing.
Journalists hardly ever made it to a DSPD unit and I was curious to see inside. According to Maden, the chief clinician at Tony's unit, it wouldn't exist without Hare's psychopath check-list. Tony was there because he had scored high on it, as had all 300 DSPD patients. The official line was that these were places to treat psychopaths with a view to one day sending them back out into the world. But the widespread theory was the whole thing was in fact a scheme to keep psychopaths locked up for life.
The unit was a clean, bland, modern, calmingly pine-coloured fortress. Nurses and security guards came over to ask me who I was. I said I was a friend of Tony's.
"Oh, Tony," one nurse said. "I know Tony."
"What do you think of Tony?" I asked him.
"I do have strong thoughts about Tony," he said, "but it would not be appropriate for me to tell you what they are."
"Are your thoughts about Tony strongly positive or strongly negative?" I asked.
He looked at me as if to say, "I am not telling you."
And then it was time. We entered the tribunal room.
The hearing lasted all of five minutes, one of which involved the magistrates telling me that if I reported the details of what happened inside the room, I would be imprisoned. So I won't. But the upshot – Tony was to be free.
He looked as if he'd been hit by a bus. In the corridor his barrister congratulated him. The process would take three months – either to find him a bed for a transitional period in a medium-secure unit, or to get him straight out on to the street – but there was no doubt. He smiled, hobbled over to me, and handed me a sheaf of papers.
They were independent reports, written for the tribunal by various psychiatrists who'd been invited to assess him. They told me things I didn't know about Tony: how his mother had been an alcoholic and used regularly to beat him up and kick him out of the house; how most of her boyfriends were drug addicts and criminals; how he was expelled from school for threatening his dinner lady with a knife; how he was sent to special schools but ran away because he missed his mother.
I wondered if sometimes the difference between a psychopath in Broadmoor and a psychopath on Wall Street was the luck of being born into a stable, rich family.
I spotted Professor Maden. I thought he might seem disappointed, but in fact he looked delighted. I wandered over.
"Ever since I went on a Bob Hare course, I've believed that psychopaths are monsters," I said. "They're just psychopaths – it's what defines them, it's what they are." I paused. "But isn't Tony kind of a semi-psychopath? A grey area? Doesn't his story prove that people in the middle shouldn't necessarily be defined by their maddest edges?"
"I think that's right," he replied. "Personally, I don't like the way Bob Hare talks about psychopaths almost as if they are a different species."
Tony was standing alone now, staring at the wall.
"He does have a very high level of some psychopathic traits," Maden said. "He never takes responsibility, everything is somebody else's fault. But he's not a serious, predatory offender. He can be a bully in the right circumstances, but doesn't set out to do serious harm for its own sake. I would also say you can never reduce any person to a diagnostic label. Tony has many endearing qualities when you look beyond the label."
"The thing is, Jon," Tony said as I looked up from the papers, "what you've got to realise is, everyone is a bit psychopathic. You are. I am." He paused. "Well, obviously I am," he said.
"What will you do now?" I asked.
"Maybe move to Belgium," he said. "There's this woman I fancy. But she's married. I'll have to get her divorced."
"Well, you know what they say about psychopaths," I said.
"We're manipulative!" said Tony .
• This is an edited extract from The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson, published by Picador on 3 June.
Jon Ronson wears (main picture, left to right): T-shirt, by amesbrosshop.com. Dead Man Suit, by agiandsam.com; T-shirt, by Mantaray, from debenhams.com; Shoes, by hebymango.com. Suit, by huntsman.com; Tie, by aspinaloflondon.com; Cufflinks, culietta.com; Shoes, by Jeff Banks at debenhams.com. Linen suit and floral shirt, both by Jeff Banks at debenhams.com; Cravat, by aspinaloflondon.com; Shoes, by tandfslackshoemakers.com. Styling: Tara Sugar. Hair and make-up: Laurey Simmons.
via guardian.co.uk
Saturday, May 21, 2011
Two Happy, Tired Houndlies
Thanks to their fancy new zip line, the dogs now run and play to their heart's content!
I think all of us have been enjoying the breezes and
Conan O'Brien's Guide To Creativity | Fast Company
When we visited his office on the Warner Bros. lot for this year's 100 Most Creative People in Business package, Conan O'Brien opened up about how he works. He's an analytical guy. He thinks a lot about the creative process, how to turn a half-baked idea from a morning brainstorm into comedy gold (or a diamond--see below) by the 4:30 p.m. taping of his TBS late-night show.
In addition to our story, a running account of O'Brien putting together a show last month, here he is talking at more length. For all the preparation he does, the best material often comes from going off-script and reacting in the moment. Which is like surfing. We’ll let him explain.
For audio from our Conan interview, click here. But these are his curated comments on creativity:
Creating a show is like playing the horses.
Creativity needs two ingredients, in comedy especially. It needs the sort of relaxing bull shitting, left-brain throwing ideas around where 99 percent of it is a waste of time. But then someone throws out a weird nugget or they're just riffing on something completely inconsequential and they come up with something great. And then the next day is about we're assembling them, we're putting it together. and you'll see rehearsal is really key, because rehearsal is where everything is put up… I can look at some things on paper and say it's going to be great. But you see it on its feet and you just know it's not there. … That's the thing I can't stress enough. In comedy, it's a little bit akin to the, there's the guy that goes down to the racetrack, looks at the horses, talks to the jockey, tastes the soil, measures the humidity. And he may do one percent better than the kooky old lady who shows up and says, "I like the color blue and I’m going to go for Blue Bottle in the fifth."
No, wait--it's really like making of a jewel.
It's almost like when you make a diamond. You need an incredible amount of pressure to turn carbon into a diamond, and I think as you get closer and closer to the show, the pressure increases, and you start running out of time and that's when more and more key decisions are made.
Prepare like crazy so you can wing it.
My formula has always been I'm big on preparing. Prepare like crazy. But then just as you're heading out, half an hour beforehand, forget all of it. It's there. It's in your reptile brain. Go out but feel loose enough to grab opportunities as they come up. Don't just stick to the plan if you see an opportunity. Now sometimes you go out there and the energy is such that you just stick to the plan and you do fine. But when you get out there and the energy is particularly good, I'm the first one to throw out things left and right and just go for it. The show is always best when it's just play. When you're playing, there's a tension, yin-yang tension between think beforehand and then just get out there, between preparation and improvisation. And that's been a lot of my career, finding the balance between those two.
Improvising is like surfing.
I'm very open to when things don't work. That becomes the fun. Obviously, Johnny Carson was really great at that. I've learned to really enjoy that. It's surfing. You don't know exactly how the wave is going to break. You get on it and then you improvise. And I think there's something, it's really inspiring actually, there's something in the human mind that knows when something is organic. That knows when something is happening in the moment. So the audience will laugh at our prepared stuff but whenever things go off the rails and I start shooting from the hip and then maybe going back and forth with Andy or a guest, and we're all shooting from the hip and we're making it up as we go along, the whole energy in the room changes. People know it. They know that this is the real thing. They know that these cookies are being made fresh right there in front of them. And it's exciting.
Creativity should be fun. Seriously.
I used to be very intense at rehearsals. I just found it wasn't helping. So I've tried to learn and say let's keep it light. Let's also not overcook things. Let's try and get things into rough shape. One of the qualities people like about what we're doing is that it can feel very loose. That's the biggest comment I get from everybody on this new show: You look like you've having so much fun. And the truth is you can't fake it. You can fake it a little bit, but you can't fake it day after day.
Fostering a collective comic sensibility is like cooking.
I do sympathize with how the batting average for writing good material is really tough, so at the very least I’m trying to create an atmosphere where failure is inevitable. And where everybody gets to make fun of everybody. Do you know what I mean? I like to screw around with them, try and make them laugh. One of my favorite things is to take out my iPhone and be pretending to read them reviews of the show we just did which all praise O'Brien's ability to rise above the writing. And all these different ways of insulting them. They know it's all a joke…I used to think I need people to marinate--this sounds disgusting--they need to marinate in the essence of Conan. So I make sure that I'm around a lot. I'm just here. I'm roaming the halls… So there's this sense that they can pick up on how I think. Now we've got so many people who have been with me for so long that some of them talk like me. But then there's also when someone comes up with something out of left field that's got a different energy and it's good. It's all of our excitement about that that sends the message that it's good to find those things.
What Conan has learned from CEOs.
The last year has been completely improvised from the time I sent out the ["People of Earth"] statement. And I think it's been one of my better years. I'm learning that not everything is in my control. I heard once years ago, they did a study and they found that really successful CEOs are good at knowing what's in their control and what's not in their control… And I have learned that there are new cycles that good for a show like mine. There are new cycles that bad for a show like mine. There are times when the guests, great guests are coming left and right. There are times when you're really in a flow, things come and go, your opportunities come and go. It rains. There's a drought. It rains. The show is not all coming from me. My job here is just to try and make the adjustments I can make, set a tone.
Conan’s pep talk to the staff.
My people tend to stick with me for a long time, and I tend to stick with them. What I try to tell them especially with this new show is, we've all been through a lot, we went through this tough time and made it through to the other side. There's a sense that it galvanized people here. We stuck together. We kept our heads. We're here, so let's enjoy this. The thing I keep telling them is the only way we can screw this up is by not being bold enough. There is nothing to lose. Let's just if we think of it, and we think it's funny let's just try and make it happen.
via fastcompany.com
Friday, May 20, 2011
A High-Tech High Heel Worthy Of NASA - You'd be a shoe-in for the man-of-the-year award for constructing a pair of these for your lady.
The carbon fiber Moon Life shoe by United Nude comes flat-packed, with assembly required.Creating a product for lunar travel means ultimate attention paid to mass, volume, and versatility. The Moon Life, created by United Nude -- the shoe company of Rem D. Koolhaas, big Rem's nephew -- isn't rocket-bound anytime soon, but it makes you wonder what our earthly products would look like if every designer were so economical.
The shoe arrives flat-packed and disassembled, its constituent parts made of carbon fiber, leather, and thin-gauge wire. The customer assembles the parts using inserts corresponding to their shoe size, and spans the wire around the platform. Thus is formed a ghostly shoe for which a thick bed of moon dust is no obstacle.
According to United Nude, the shoe also functions well in "gravity rich" environments as well, and soon you'll be able to buy it. The final version of the product is still being refined in anticipation of a very small production run, which will be sold here, as well as at Museum gift shops and UnitedNude.com this summer.
Chris Dannen
Chris Dannen has written about innovation and technology for FastCompany, CBS, MIT Technology Review and The Atlantic. He is author of two ... Read more
via fastcodesign.com
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
