A Goldilocks story

What on earth is that, you ask?  That is Felix's toothbrush in Felix's toothbrush holder which has been stuck onto the cap of Felix's toothpaste by--you guessed it--Felix.  And frankly, I admire him for it.

I don't think anyone can accurately predict what sort of parent they will turn out to be.  Having become one, however, your natural parenting style manifests itself in short order.  I was unaware of this fact and thus long before the birth of my own children imagined I had already chosen what sort of parent to be.  I had three models before me, having observed my eldest three siblings with their own kids over the years.  It looked (upon what was never better than casual inspection and that with the willfully callow eye of the bachelor) like a Goldilocks story:  one was too strict, the other too permissive, the third just right in her (oops, I gave it away) balance between the two.  Well now, I'll be, let's see, hmmm...hey, I'll be just right!

I'm not.  I'm too strict.  At some deep level I feel it better to be feared than loved.  Misbehavior offends my sense of order.  With sleep in short supply I exist in a base state of annoyance.  Whatever the reason, several years of experience prove that I am not just right, I am certainly not too permissive, I am, simply said, too strict.

Felix is a bright boy with ideas of his own.  Lots and lots of ideas.  His latest such was that his toothbrush and its holder should live in his room.  Do I need to explain to you what a bad idea I found that to be?  Are you surprised to hear that I dismissed this proposal out of hand?  No.  But did that stop Felix?  Of course not.  Felix, tired of the toothbrush always being in the same place, certain there was a better arrangement to be had, invented (quite behind my back) a compromise.  I am delighted to see it and hereby publicly confess that he is the better man for having found it (or even looked for it) first.  Good for you, boy.

And how will Gideon deal with this too strict father of his?  As my other entries have perhaps suggested, Gideon is mischievous by nature.  Suggestion, however, is but a part truth, so let me state it more baldly:  that kid is flat out trouble.  So, how will Flat Out Trouble deal with this too strict father of his?  I don't know, but something tells me the thoughtful and practical compromise will prove more characteristic of the older child than the younger.

Confidence man

My father-in-law, who knows me well enough to have had me (among others) in mind when he posted to Facebook Yesterday at 7:13am near Philadelphia, PA, recommends an article in a recent issue of the Times:  "Don't Blink! The Hazards of Confidence" (nor is he alone:  it's the #2 emailed article even some days post publication).  He took from it the following lesson:

In general, however, you should not take assertive and confident people at their own evaluation unless you have independent reason to believe that they know what they are talking about. Unfortunately, this advice is difficult to follow: overconfident professionals sincerely believe they have expertise, act as experts and look like experts. You will have to struggle to remind yourself that they may be in the grip of an illusion.

True dat, but how, practically speaking, do you tell the difference between an actual expert and, say, Supergid?

You could develop your own opinion on the matter at hand and compare it to the expert's supplied opinion. More conveniently, you could examine the reasoning the professional expert included (or is, one hopes, prepared to supply) by way of supplement and background to his or her own assertions, and evaluate its soundness for yourself.  Either way, you are prepared to evaluate a chain of logic, aren't you, and surely you care enough to try?

My business experience suggests otherwise.  In the course of some years' consulting I have worked for only two people who wanted to review (much less understand) my chain of reasoning in any depth, and one of those two was way ahead of me at every step regardless, being altogether more expert in the subject at hand, not to mention even more powerfully possessed of the feeling of confidence.  People have typically hired me as an expert (or, on more than one occasion, as someone they expected to become expert) because they were not prepared to do that thinking themselves.  In general, you should not take anyone at their own evaluation unless you have independent reason to believe that they know what they are talking about--after all, underconfident people are as misguided as overconfident ones--but the fact is we seek the opinions of others, in business life at least, precisely because our capacity to evaluate is limited by our own bandwidth, experience, and abilities.

You want some really actionable advice?  Never trust someone wearing a cape.

Made in China

Recognize these boats?  I expect you do:  likely your kids play or played with them in the tub.  And guess what:  likely you did, too.  I found the boat on the left at my mother's house some months ago.  I immediately identified it as a bathtub toy from my own very young childhood, part of a set that included a sailboat and a PT boat, possibly one or two others.  I reclaimed it, as well as the sailboat that turned up nearby, and brought it back to my own boys.  It has floated (or, more often, sunk) in our tub ever since.

As of yesterday it no longer sails alone:  a nearly identical ferryboat, not to mention the rest of the set, all shiny and new, suddenly appeared in our bathroom, legitimate prizes, I am told, from a playdate at Luca's house.  This means that someone in China (see below) has been churning out the same set of plastic vessels for forty years.

How many pieces of industrial design can claim a lifespan of so many decades essentially unchanged?  As a historian of technology I ask this not as a simple exclamation of surprise but as a serious research question, good material for a seminar, say, or even a dissertation ("Constant Companions:  A Century of Consistency in Nautical Toy Design").  And as an historian I will offer an educated guess:  not many.

It also raises the question of whether and to what degree new toys are good toys.  I trust we have all heard by now that the "Baby Einstein" phenomenon is nothing but snake oil for tiger parents, but I must admit the boys show no greater interest in the Playskool and Fisher-Price pieces of yesteryear (again, retrieved from our parents' archives) that Talia and I have bestowed upon them than in the more up-to-date pieces from, say, Plan Toys.  Another educated guess, this time speaking as a parent:  electronics aside, the new toys are no better or worse than the old.

That having been said, there's no beating a true classic, such as Hasbro's Millenium Falcon, found roadside and shown below, in an unguarded (by the older brother) moment:

Good toys, bad toys, there's one thing that surely endures throughout the ages:  the sibling's eternal war cry, "THAT'S MINE!"

Johannes is jarig

Hoera!  Hoera!  My dear friend Johannes just turned 65 (both of us shown, somewhat younger, above).  I, as per our usual unspoken agreement, did not wish him happy birthday on the day of, but did happen to call him the day after.  I was surprised to learn that the birthday in question was his 65th, but, having discovered this, was not particularly surprised to hear that Het Parool, the newspaper in which he does the bulk of his publishing, had dedicated an entire issue of its weekly magazine to him.  He mailed me a copy, and here it is:

“Johannes is jarig” it announces. “Een feestnummer.”  And there he sits, not exactly happy but surely not as grim as he gets, beneath a festive aerial display with at center a green disc with a big purple “65” in its middle.  Johannes himself is hoisting a flute of champagne—freshly poured the bubbles tell us, and almost certainly spilled in the process, overfull as it is—but you may be sure he didn’t taste it if it were anything below Bollinger. Before him sits a taart, from Holtkamp it must be, that much they surely knew.  The taart is ready to be cut, but where is the cake knife?  How will Johannes, who has his cake, get to eat it too?  He will use his own knife—it’s there at his right elbow—one of many hundreds he owns, most likely his favorite, a folding, French-manufactured blade of his own design, though the handle of this one is white and my memory (and his style) says it should be black.

Small mysteries, but the biggest one is that such a magazine cover would exist at all.  Johannes does not care to have his birthday noted, much less celebrated.  In fact, he detests it.  This is why I call him only the day after his birthday, to point up that once again I have not wished him happy birthday.  And yet here it is:  not only did Het Parool dedicate an entire magazine to him but Johannes even appears to have cooperated in the endeavor.  Why?

We turn the page, and there he is again, this time pouring, the bottle carefully turned so as to avoid product placement, and mis-pouring at that:  one pours the champagne down the side of the glass, as he would be the first to tell you.  Below:  “Mijn verjaardag doet mij helemaal niets,” which is to say “I don’t give a damn for my birthday,” just as I said.  But oddest of all, the commentary bottom right by the stripling editor of the magazine in which he names Johannes an “ouwe brombeer,” which is exactly what I would expect Christopher Robin to call Pooh in translation.  It makes me want to smack the snipe; I can’t imagine how it makes Johannes feel.

Page on and we find some lovely photos of Johannes as I know him best: at breakfast by Hoppe (he swears by their coffee as if insisting so will hide the fact that it is solidly average and simply the only thing at that hour available within reach of his door); at the bar of De Zwart; and, my favorite, Johannes at home, indeed, at table, his obscenely cluttered workbench showing its usual slew of books and papers at left, miscellanea in the middle, food at the end, which is where I always sit, for obvious reasons.

In between you are given Johannes’s life story as told by the man himself, or rather as retold for what must be the hundredth time, plus a few mini-bios by friends and colleagues.  I have met all those people, always at a table at De Zwart, and heard what they had to say about Johannes, albeit from Johannes’s lips rather than theirs.  I read on, hoping to find some morsel that really satisfies, but the truth is I just miss Johannes, and neither pictures nor words will do much to feed me.

I still don't know why Johannes agreed to all this.  Searching, I turn the last page and there is Ilja, Johannes’s faithful (it’s the only word for it) assistant and, to my mind, only conceivable heir to the old man’s throne. Another mini-bio this, and though I’ve spent a good deal of time with Ilja there are here a few facts I did not know.  Best of all, and worth the rest of the issue put together, his closing comment--“We hebben allebei het hart op de tong”--which stands as the best single summary of the man there could ever be.  But I close the magazine, and this entry, without an answer.