Wizard's Blog

Parents Drop the MikeMay 13th, 2017 at 10:37:13 am

I made the front page of the May 13-14, 2017 weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal. As usual, it was for the project I initiated with at the Social Security Administration to track the most popular baby names. I was the first to publish such lists that were based on a nationwide sampling. The whole thing became an accidental claim to fame.

This article focuses on the demise of the name Michael and my roll in it. For those of you with an online subscription to the Wall Street Journal, the online article can be found here. For those without one, here are links to scans of the print article:

New Parents Don't Like Mike -- page 1
New Parents Don't Like Mike -- page 2

For those who prefer the online version, which includes a lot of Michael pictures, including mine, it ran with a different name:

Parents Drop the Mike-- page 1
Parents Drop the Mike-- page 2
Parents Drop the Mike-- page 3
Parents Drop the Mike-- page 4
Parents Drop the Mike-- page 5
Parents Drop the Mike-- page 6
Parents Drop the Mike-- page 7
Parents Drop the Mike-- page 8

Finally, I'm proud to have my dotted image in the WSJ, even if it make only the online version.

Comments

SOOPOO May 13th, 2017 at 1:52:49 pm	Impressive! Think how few people in history have caused such a change..... I guess there are few Adolphs being named as well......
Nareed May 15th, 2017 at 12:50:46 pm	This is the kind of thing you should post in the forum, where more people will see it.
AZDuffman May 15th, 2017 at 4:50:23 pm	Nice dotted image! Did you send them a recent pic or did they find their own? FWIW I came so, so close to having my pic on the first part of the Marketplace section years ago. I was at a speed dating event and someone wanted to take a pic of the gal and me for some paper. I was up for it, she was not. This would have been the end of it but I was a subscriber and weeks later there was one of the WSJ expanded articles on speed dating, with what would have been the two of us! Huge! I was in the background and could tell myself, thought nobody else could. sigh
Wizard May 17th, 2017 at 7:01:22 pm	Quote: Nice dotted image! Did you send them a recent pic or did they find their own? They asked for one so I provided this one. I'm not crazy how it looks like I have no lower lip. Quote: FWIW I came so, so close to having my pic on the first part of the Marketplace section years ago. I was at a speed dating event and someone wanted to take a pic of the gal and me for some paper. I was up for it, she was not. This would have been the end of it but I was a subscriber and weeks later there was one of the WSJ expanded articles on speed dating, with what would have been the two of us! Huge! I was in the background and could tell myself, thought nobody else could. sigh I hope to hear more about your experiences with speed dating sometime. I would be terrible at it. I'd feel very put on the spot and not know what to say. Then again, I never know what to say to women in any amount of time, except torture them with trivia questions and logic puzzles.
AZDuffman May 18th, 2017 at 3:59:55 am	Quote: I hope to hear more about your experiences with speed dating sometime. I would be terrible at it. I'd feel very put on the spot and not know what to say. Then again, I never know what to say to women in any amount of time, except torture them with trivia questions and logic puzzles. I only went the one time. Since this board seems to be all guys I will say that men have it better as there is usually a wait list for women. That does not mean there will be lots of chicks to choose from, though, as they mostly balance it. Occasionally a woman will have a "dead" spot if the numbers are uneven. But men sign up at the last minute if they do at all while women love the organized way of meeting men. In fact, I was at the office talking about thinking of going and a guy I worked with knew the women hosting it and said to "get over there, they are scrounging to get enough guys!" So I tried it. I made only one match, who never returned my calls :-( As you might expect, it was weird at first then you get used to it and a pattern. They set us up by age, but after that you got no choice as to race, kids, etc. Luck of the draw, a step above going to a bar. It takes all kinds, some women were nice, some shy, some interested, some not. One was on a mission, asked my religion and about kids in 30 seconds. I could tell she wanted to keep in her own religion for her kids. The religion thing I was fine on (in that town you had a huge chance of meeting another Catholic) but I do not want kids and strongly prefer the women have none. I did not check the box. To anyone going I would say know what you do for a living and have a way to make it sound interesting. I failed there. Have an "elevator speech" about your life. Have a few canned questions about her. On a date this is a no-no since women feel the date to be a job interview. On speed dating it is expected. Then again, I made no matches so what do I know.
Pacomartin June 17th, 2017 at 1:20:13 pm	Mike Dotted Halftone Pattern Effect You should probably make your own halftone that you can submit. That way you know what the final product will look like. At least your story is whimsical. How many people can say they deliberately made their own name less popular so they would be more unique?

Mindy CohnMay 30th, 2014 at 9:47:59 am

Normally I'm not one to remember dreams, but last night I thought I woke up around 3 AM, as I often do, went downstairs to dink around on the Internet, and read that Mindy Cohn died. It seemed very realistic, as I read reports of her death online. Then I went here to write about my thoughts on Mindy and the Facts of Life in general. Finally, I finished and went back to sleep.

When I got up I went to check on comments about my personal obituary for Mindy and didn't see that I wrote anything. I Googled her name and she seems to be alive and well. Obviously, I must have dreamed that I woke up and did everything I just wrote about. Very odd. Maybe remnants of feelings over my father's recent death. However, it is strange I would dream about Mindy. Although I will take anybody on in Facts of Life trivia, I never especially identified with Mindy's character Natalie.

I welcome the psychoanalysts of the forum to provide their own interpretation.

Image source: www.televisionhits.com.

Comments

Face May 30th, 2014 at 10:22:23 am	Dream reading or interpretation I find to be similar to self-help in that you can’t do it for someone, you can only supply them tools. There’s just too much that an outsider couldn’t know to even begin. What was the focus of the dream? Was it her? Was it the show? Was it writing? Was it death? Was it going up and down the stairs? The answers to all these questions will change the answer to what your dream meant. Mostly, I find dreams to be one of two things. One is just something that struck you and stuck in your mind. I find I often times will dream of something if something noticeable happens that I immediately forget about. Say I was gardening and turned over a log to see a snake. There would be that moment of shock. Now, if it was either a plain snake or if it ran away before I could inspect it, I’d immediately forget about it. But since there was that shock, it’s almost as if my brain demands it be processed and it will come up in a dream. The same goes for random thoughts while daydreaming, or startling ideas that I have and forget. Anything that hits my brain hard and then gets immediately forgetten always reappears. I don’t consider these dreams worthy of evaluating. It’s just your brain doing whatever it is that it does. The other dreams, the “weird ones”, are almost always your brain working out a problem, which is why I said it’s important to know what part of your dream was the subject. The shock of her death could indeed be your brain working out your own stress over your father. If it was the shock of Mindy’s death that was the subject, there’s a good chance that it is. But it’s sort of up to you to try to read your own dream. You should know what the subject was, what parts were important or “hit you hard”, and what parts where just filler to allow it to all make sense. Where the stairs a filler? Or was there meaning in the transit of them? Did “taking the stairs” carry weight in your mind? If they carried meaning, how do you feel about stairs in waking thought? Are they enjoyable? Miserable? A challenge? Do you take pride in using them? Every part of what “mattered” in your dream, what had meaning, needs to be evaluated. After that, it’s sort of… well, it’s sort of like reading the Bible. Your dream is like an allegorical puzzle that only you can solve. What does writing here mean to you? Is it just a habit and cropped up into your dream as filler? Is it an outlet for you that in your dream could signify a relief from stress? Do you find it a waste of time that your brain could use as a negative in a dream? All that stuff needs to be thought out. I had a dream once that my kid was a wolf. I was alone in the woods, a wolf was there, and I needed to protect my kid from it but couldn’t find him. The wolf eventually attacked where I thought my kid to be so I shot it. The wolf then morphed into my kid, replete with the bloody bullet holes from the shotgun blast. It still brings tears to my eyes to think about it now, but looking back, that was my brain dealing with the stress of the custody fight I was in. I was so worried about making the wrong decision and in trying to help him, hurting him. It took maybe a week to interpret that dream, but once you start breaking it down into its parts and finding what has meaning and what doesn’t, its reason and meaning become obvious. Good luck, and report back =) (sorry for the essay long post =p)
Wizard May 30th, 2014 at 5:23:50 pm	You certainly went beyond the call of duty with that response, thank you. My dream was mostly focused on me thinking of what I should say about Mindy. It was mostly me surfing the web and reading about her life. Maybe of all four characters on the Facts of Life it was her because I usually relate the best with women who are upbeat and on the heavy side. I was also hit kind of hard by the UCSB shooting. It happened on my birthday and I lived a short block away from that convenience store my last year at UCSB. Of course, Mindy is older than college age now, but in my mind she will always be a teenager. I wanted to post my feelings about it, but I'm sure the usual suspects would turn the thread into a platform to denounce gun control laws.
Face June 1st, 2014 at 5:09:52 pm	>>>I wanted to post my feelings about it, but I'm sure the usual suspects would turn the thread into a platform to denounce gun control laws.<<< Ah =/ Sorry about that. It's one of the few topics I just can't leave alone. I'd say the UCSB shooting likely did cause the dream. Close by, personal ties, all of that is enough to get deep and trigger something. Dreams are weird like that. They sort of just grab stuff that "works", even if "working" isn't apparent right away. Mindy was someone you "knew but didn't". She was someone from your past. There wasn't a "personal connection", but there was some connection. Those people who were killed are also people you "knew but didn't". They were familiar, even if you never knew they existed, just because they've been somewhere you were. That place was from your past. You aren't and weren't connect to UCSB or those people personally, but yet, you're attached to them in a certain way by sharing the same stomping ground. Of course, that's just one explanation of many, but it's an example of how to sort of dig in and figure out those weird dreams. If the above doesn't feel right, then it's not. Play around with different ideas. You'll know when you hit on it, it's like a bell going off and it'll make perfect sense.
Wizard June 1st, 2014 at 9:08:38 pm	Your responses have been so good that I can't think of any angle to challenge them. You should do this for a living.
Face June 2nd, 2014 at 6:06:40 am	Haha, thanks. I'll add it to my list of "numerous skills with no marketable value" =) I couldn't with good conscious ever do this for money. Most people who would pay are the types who believe dreams have a deep meaning, like on a supernatural level. I have a number of native friends who I sought out to translate my wolf dream (which was much more in depth than what I offered) and many of them made connections to spiritual overlookers, as the wolf is a powerful sigul in native lore. I can't dig that. I do believe dreams have meaning, but not on that level. My dream, for example, was my unconscious mind's way of making a very roundabout point - I need to stop stressing as it's only making things worse. It absolutely had meaning, but it wasn't a message from the spirit world. It was all completely logical, just this type of logic gets stretched a little by imagination, by a brain set loose from conscious thought and allowed to run wild. I'm sure you're familiar with Aesop's Fables. Same thing. A very bizarre and roundabout way to give a simple message. It's just these messages, your dreams, are something you get to live. And there's no moral of the story provided. You have to find it yourself =)
odiousgambit June 2nd, 2014 at 6:22:53 am	Michael, I wonder if you remember me saying that upon the death of a parent, that parent often visits you in your dreams in a very vivid way. Other people have told me this too. It's a mixed feeling you get, but mostly a nice, somehow necessary experience. Happened to me anyway this way. Has this happened at all to you?
Wizard June 7th, 2014 at 6:27:38 pm	Regarding the post above, no other really vivid dreams since the Mindy Cohn one. I remembered dreams a lot better when I was younger.
odiousgambit June 8th, 2014 at 4:40:05 am	Here's to your Mom living a long, long time. Assuming though, that she pre-deceases you that might be the time you get the "visitations" , maybe then from both of them. Of course, maybe not at all, not sure how prevalent this is.