Sorry for the late posting today, baboons. Today’s guest blog is by Jacque.

The autumn skies are spectacular, especially at dawn and dusk. There is a point immediately after the sun sets on a clear day, when the light is dim, all silhouettes crisp. The exclamation point is the moonrise looming over the nearly night sky. Several weeks ago, driving home from work each evening at dusk, beautiful sunsets were strutting their stuff. Gorgeous shades of pink, yellow, orange, blue, and lavender spread across the western horizon. The car was headed westward, so each evening I saw the whole thing, start to finish. What a beautiful drive home.

It made me think of my late father and his favorite color. My sister, our friends, and I were obsessed with determining our favorite colors. We experimented with all the colors from the Crayola box. We also polled our parents and neighbors, persistently asking, “What is your favorite color?” Mom’s was orange. Dad’s was Sky Blue Pink with a Heavenly Border. Wow. Nobody could top that one. And he would show us this color at sunset.

“Look. There it is!” he would say, pointing west to the horizon.

So in September, when the sunsets were so lovely and I was making my way west towards home, I began to think of him. This prompted me to write a blog, with a picture of a sunset, of course. I had to carry my camera everywhere, so I could pull over and catch the color for the blog.

It took weeks. The sunsets were suddenly bland. The camera broke. I had to buy a new camera, learn to use it, and catch the just right sunset. I waited for days for the proper color and scene. It was tough. I took many pictures which were colorless, uninspiring, just not Dad’s color. Finally I found one that would do, even though it does not have quite enough Heavenly Border.

Then one morning, as I headed out to walk the dog I saw it again on the mailbox in the form of Morning Glories:

The beautiful sunset inspired memories, pleasant thoughts and a photographic binge. I learned new skills after the colors made me spend money on a new camera so I could share it with you. You just never know what a sunset will inspire.

What does color do for you? Do you have a favorite?

Today our guest post comes from Steve.

The difficulty of talking about guilty pleasures is that people have such different notions of the concept.

Many women will purr and confess that a chocolate delight from Just Truffles is their guilty pleasure. I’m sorry; that is not a guilty pleasure! That’s an indulgence . . . and a particularly aristocratic one. People who try to pass that off as a guilty pleasure are suggesting that even when they succumb to a sybaritic craving they have exquisite taste.

Nor is it a guilty pleasure when your two-year old daughter expresses her adoration for “macky cheese,” painting her face and torso with what comes out of those boxes, including powdered ersatz cheese in a shocking shade of orange. She can’t have a guilty pleasure because she just doesn’t have informed taste.

No, a guilty pleasure is something that you know is schlock, and yet you find it irresistible. It is some kind of compelling treat we are ashamed of enjoying. Some remarkably cultured women are suckers for bodice-ripper romance novels. A liberal who enjoys “Gone With the Wind”—with all that Southern claptrap and racial stereotyping—is slumming in ways that reek of a guilty pleasure. And there are so many more: Karen Carpenter’s music, gossip shows on TV, vampire novels and any Hostess or Little Debbie pastry treat.

I have several authentic guilty pleasures. The one I can talk about (with some blushing) is the TV reality show, Survivor. I’m currently following the twenty-third season of it, and I have scarcely missed an episode from those earlier twenty-two years.

Don’t lecture me about how awful that show is. I know, I know! I’m the guy who has watched over 200 episodes! All that stuff about the “tribes” is painfully cornball. The jungle music is gauche. The shows are heavily edited to control audience responses, so you can’t trust your eyes. When Jeff Probst reads the Tribal Council votes, the order of the votes has been carefully arranged for dramatic effect. Most contestants are immature peacocks. The shows are as phony as an email from a Nigerian prince.

And yet I watch. Every week. Why do I watch? Three reasons.

First, Survivor episodes are mostly unscripted. So much TV is stale and predictable that I thrill to something that has a touch of real life to it, even if “reality” is as hokey as it is here.

Second, the challenges are almost irresistible watching. Under the pressure of challenges, cool contenders sometimes melt down and habitual losers occasionally find grit that nobody would have guessed was in them. Challenges that feature an ability to deal with pain often produce the most unlikely heroes. As silly as the Survivor game is, it showcases people performing under stress, and that always has the potential to be interesting.

Finally, while it is not ethical to conduct many kinds of experiments with human beings as subjects, that happens on every episode of Survivor. The show is like a fiendish laboratory where people are put under cruel pressure and tested weekly, with results that are as instructive as they are unpredictable.

The single salient lesson I draw from all those silly shows I’ve watched is that most of us are our own worst enemies. Over and over, contestants fail in the game because they cannot escape their essential personalities. The bossy woman proud of being a leader offends everyone and gets voted out. The accomplished liar gets tangled up in his stories. The guy who sees himself as a “warrior” in tune with his own primal energy becomes an object of derision. The calendar model with implants assumes her looks will reward her, but she inspires seething hatred among other women and is given the bum’s rush.

In the exit interview, contestants always claim to be proud of the way they played the game, never mind that they just lost. What they say is, “I had to be true to myself.” They apparently don’t see that they have stuck with their usual strategy for dealing with the others, even when that wasn’t working for them. Those who do well in the game usually are able to pick and choose the way they interact with others. So the game isn’t entirely silly. I think it instructs me every week about effective and dysfunctional ways of pursuing one’s life goals. But still, it is a guilty pleasure!

Do you have a guilty pleasure?

Today’s guest post is by Clyde.

I collect graveyards.

Cemeteries are full of life, not human life, but plant and animal life. They reflect human history, culture, vanities, and foibles. People intend tombs and markers to enshrine power, success, or wealth, but over time such efforts fade to a sort of sad satire. Maybe that is only my viewpoint. Cemeteries are retreats, calm and restful, often set off in quiet and lonely places. Here on the prairie, they were usually placed on land of no farm use; thus they preserve land shapes and plants from the pioneer era.
I have visited hundreds in many states. Perhaps, for whatever reason I do not know, my most memorable, which I visited several times and more than once used as a place in which to compose a sermon, are the half-dozen ragged, rugged little graveyards scattered across the forest 30 miles or so north of Two Harbors. So much fun to pronounce the lyrical old Finnish names on the tombstones, once you have half-mastered the art. Only a Finn fully masters that arcane skill.

I will tell you about five cemeteries in particular.

Most Historic: Rural Lebannon, CT.
Although this one has strong competition from Salem, Massachusetts (both have those wonderful tall thin old stone tombstones like an Edward Gorey drawing), this one wins because it also has the tomb of Jonathan Trumbull, who was essentially secretary of war during the Revolution. Now inactive, the cemetery is hidden away down a lonesome rolling side road. A friend of mine has done a 30-year study of the growth of lichens on the tombstones and surrounding rock wall. The dates on the tombstones help him plot lichen growth.

Quirkiest:Across the Minnesota River from Nicollet.
This is a well-maintained active prairie cemetery surrounded by cornfields in a Welsh area. It’s peaceful to walk a secluded cemetery with the eternal sound of rustling cornstalks. In the older section of the cemetery all the names are Welsh, all except in one corner is a man named Zimmerman. My theory is that one night some Germans sneaked in and buried a relative.

Most Unusual:Point Hope, Alaska.
On the tundra outside of this Inupiat village, the most westerly point on the American continents, is a native cemetery, the fence of which is composed of whale ribs. But outside that fence, “outside the pale,” which is what that term means, are several lone graves. When a member of the tribe dies, the elders decide if the person is worthy of being buried within the ribs, or, sometimes, the person chooses not to be included.

Most Poignant: On a bluff above the Minnesota River near Nicollet.
This still active but hard-to-find cemetery has a nice view overlooking the river valley; however, it is for one tombstone that I name this cemetery. The tombstone, a ten-foot tall obelisk, is a lesson on the fragility of children and the dangers of childbirth 100 years ago, common lessons in historic cemeteries. On one side the obelisk names a man who lived for about 70 years, dying in the 1920’s. On a second side it names a woman of the same last name who died in her early twenties in the 1880’s. A small unmarked stone lies seven feet out from the obelisk. On the next side is a second woman of the same last name who died two years later, again with a small stone seven feet out. On the third side is woman of the same last name who outlived the man by a few years; no small stone is present. Draw your own sad conclusion.

Most Frequently Visited: Calvary, Mankato.
A large very well-maintained cemetery on the wooded bluffs of
Mankato a mile from my house. I enjoy bike riding the paved roads of this cemetery in the early morning. The master caretakers who tend Calvary keep all the many trees trimmed to eight feet off the ground, which makes the early morning sun shinning under boughs onto the green grass an energizing mileau in which to ride, especially while listening to “Pipedreams.” Many a lesson can be learned here about human vanities and pretensions, both in the cemetery and among the million dollar homes which have been built next to it in the last decade. I am remind me that Thoreau said that our homes are just an doorstep to a hole in the ground.

I have, now that I think about it, only visited cemeteries in the daylight. John Muir, as a poor young man bumming around the US in the mid 1800’s, slept in cemeteries because then the police and other people would not bother him.

Would you sleep in a cemetery?

Today’s guest blog is by Steve Grooms

America was in the seventh year of its war with North Vietnam in the fall of 1971. That fall I was a graduate student in the University of Minnesota. I wasn’t sure what degree I was seeking or what I’d do with it, once I’d graduated. I mainly had to maintain official student status so I wouldn’t be drafted to join the war.

I had hated this war since its start. Every night I shook with fury as various national leaders went on television to lie about the “progress” of the war. Every year, more and more people died—young and old, Vietnamese and American, civilians and soldiers. Every year, the official logic for the war looked more insane.

I finally decided that my hatred of the war might provide a plan for my life. The American public was not getting the straight story about Vietnam. Maybe I could become the sort of pioneering journalist who would show all my docile countrymen how wrong the war was. Even better, perhaps I could become a columnist with a courageous voice who would write op/ed essays showing my readers how stupid they were to believe the lies the U.S. government was feeding them about the war.

And so I decided to switch my major from American studies to journalism. I had a lot to catch up on, for I had never yet taken a journalism course. Unfortunately, I had a late registration date, so all desirable courses in writing and editing were filled before I could sign up for classes. In fact, the only promising course still open was “Public Opinion and Propaganda.” At least that course would relate to my intention to use journalism to open the public’s eyes to the madness of the war.

Things didn’t go as planned. That class shocked and confused me in a way no other event in my long educational history had done.

The first shock was learning how silly I had been to think I could educate people by telling them the truth. The first section of the course showed how diligently people protect their pet beliefs from anything that challenges those beliefs. One study we read showed that people have at least eleven different strategies for denying information or views that they don’t want to hear. Eleven! Although to tell the truth, any single one of those mental tricks will usually work to keep unwelcome facts or views at a distance.

For example, if new facts threaten the values people already hold, people have no trouble ignoring the new facts. Or they might encounter information they don’t like and simply forget it. Or they might misremember things so badly that they think that the new facts actually support their preferred view of things. Or they might summarily dismiss unwelcome views because they came from a suspect source. And so it goes.

The lesson was hammered home over and over: People are going to believe whatever they choose to believe.

Before I had been in the course for a week I could see that the world needed another angry young man with a typewriter about as much as it needed more communicable diseases. I wasn’t going to win the hearts and minds of fellow Americans with all the predictable liberal cant I planned to publish. People would never thank me for telling them my version of the truth. ”Oh, so this war is actually a tragic and murderous mistake? Gee, I wish I’d heard earlier, but thanks, Steve, for finally straightening me out!”

My first response to my new sense of public opinion and propaganda was a practical one. I dropped the silly plan to become a crusading writer. My graduate school major went from “journalism” back to “damned if I know!”

And yet the most significant impact of the course on me had less to do with an occupation and more with character. My course taught me that people were amazingly wily and energetic when their pet beliefs were threatened. But I was a “people” too! I had a belief structure, too, that I was surely defending with all the techniques I’d been studying. Like everyone else on earth, I was a shyster and a con man who could lie and forget and spin and misremember things so I wouldn’t experience the discomfort of doubting my own preferred version of truth.

Since 1971 I have tried to live with the uneasy fact that much of what I believe in—including things I passionately believe in—is probably not true. Of course, one can know that without knowing which core values and facts are bogus. Now I live with a sort of Truth Policeman in my head who knows every sly trick I use to protect my preferred way of seeing things. He cuts me no slack, that dirty copper! He catches me when I resort to mental tricks to preserve my comfort zone of faith.

And yet I have come here to praise him, not bury him with a lot of whining. It is healthy to be asked—or forced to—defend one’s pet beliefs. When I sense myself wanting to believe in something, I automatically become skeptical. The more I want to believe something, the more likely I am to be lying to myself. Oy weh and ish da! This kind of self-doubt can mess up your mind.

Ultimately, I’m not sure this kind of self-awareness can make a person better at seeing the truth. It is surely more realistic to hope that wisdom and self-awareness about these issues can makes us a bit more humble about all those things we think we know about the world.

Have you ever encountered a gifted teacher, special course or singular event that shook up your personal values and caused you to re-think pet beliefs?