Month: November 2024

 

“It Ain’t Necessarily So,”* that the beholder of a smile is happy.  Nor is happiness always reflected in a smile.  *(from the opera Porgy and Bess 1935, George and Ira Gershwin)

What is happiness anyway, contentment, joy, giddiness, bliss?  At any rate, happiness and smiles are probably correlated, or related, but one does not really cause the other.

However, I do think it’s proven scientifically that if you force a smile, certain happy hormones, or endorphins kick in as if you meant it.  It apparently doesn’t matter if you’re faking a smile or if you’re genuinely pleased about something, thus cracking a smile; fluffy chemicals supercharge your being.

The thinking is that when your facial muscles form a smile, neurotransmitters such as dopamine, serotonin and endorphins, associated with positive emotion, are released.  This is called a facial feedback hypothesis, and over time, this feedback trend can lead to genuine feelings.

“When you’re smiling, the whole world smiles with you” (1928).  I think smiles are truly contagious.  I’m sure it has been proven in various experiments over time.  It’s hard to be a sourpuss when someone smiles at you.  But then there are always exceptions.

Have you ever wondered why people didn’t smile for photographs in the 19^th and twentieth centuries?  The usual answer is that with long exposure times unlike today’s instant photography, people just couldn’t hold a smile for a whole minute.  Try it.

I know, while we’re waiting for the whole family to pose, my smile grows more and more fake the longer I hold it.  So, people didn’t smile for those photos.  It all began with painted portraits for which people sat for hours, posing.

However, cultural history also tells us that perceptions of smiling have changed over time.  Smiling for photographs was considered poor etiquette and undignified by the upper classes.  Only the poor, drunk, lewd and folks of the low class smiled in photographs.

This was until the 1920s when actors in motion pictures expressed a whole range of emotions.  After this time, photographers and painters alike began to expect at least a little bit of a smile from their subjects.  “Say cheese.”

The yellow smiley face symbol, created by graphic designer Harvey Ball in 1963 has become a universal symbol for happiness.  I guess the smiley face was the parent of today’s plethora of emoji’s including the smiley face, which demonstrate how we’re feeling.

For most of us, our faces are the blank slates upon which we display what we’re feeling on the inside.  I saw the perfect saying on social media recently, “I don’t need a Mood Ring, I have a Face!”

When we grow up, we learn how to behave and how to think, including how to show our emotions.  People read emotions differently to some degree, depending on how, when, or where we were brought up.

However, the ability to read emotions from faces is pretty much a universal skill.  Even people from different cultural backgrounds interpret facial expressions about the same.

There can be a dozen things going wrong with you and when someone asks, “how are you,” you usually smile and at least say, “okay.”  I saw this on social media recently and it pretty much explains this phenomenon, “I smile and act like nothing is wrong.  It’s called dealing with life and staying strong.”

In today’s world, you can hit delete quickly if you’re not happy with your smile.  That makes me a tad happy.

I’ve been sorting thousands of family pictures of old and oh dear, some of them really should not have been kept for posterity, really.  Some amateur photographers, usually “mom,” took pictures without considering that their subject wasn’t framed in their best self.

Thus, the selfie was born.  I personally think this was because of all those horrid pictures mom took and kept in an album or twenty.  The selfie is redemptive.

A crooked smile, delete.  A triple chin angle, delete.  I now hate that shirt, delete.  Finally, my best smile, best angle, good hair day, tummy is tucked as much as it can be.  It’s a selfie at its best and I’m posting it on social media.

You’ve got something to smile about, I know it.  Just ponder a moment, and I’ll bet you’ll smile just in time for Thanksgiving.

 

 

The history of passwords is really kind of fascinating.  Essentially, one has always needed a password or two to enter a secret, private, or mysterious place.  At least, since the early 1700s.

Apparently, many people want to get into the same place that you want to get into.  So, for your own protection, you must create a password to enter that place safely.  The only way to be granted entry by the guardians of privacy, to your own personal information is to correctly pass the memory test of the password.

Passwords supposedly distinguish friends from foes.  If you know the password, you’re determined to be friendly, and you may enter.  But today, we may have been hacked and therefore enemies may enter the camp at any time, and we really don’t know who our friends are.

Pass codes have for hundreds of years been written down on cards or wooden tablets and circulated among friendly forces.  I’ll bet you have a “secret” place where your passwords are kept.  I have bunches of them.  Some of them are unique and impossible to remember if not recorded somewhere for reference.

The password police don’t want us to write down our passwords.  We’re supposed to just remember them.

At least, however, I don’t use 1234…., like half the universe who just want to access the places they frequent without a big silly rigamarole.  Speaking of being hacked.

The word hacked has come to mean “gaining unauthorized access to data in a computer system.”  It used to mean cutting something up roughly and with heavy blows.  For example, “grandma hacked the neck off of a chicken and brought it into the kitchen to finish it off for this evening’s supper!”

Only the correct information gets you into these places where you want to go.  And by golly you just aren’t getting in if you’ve forgotten the all-important password.  In fact, you might just get locked out, maybe for thirty days or longer.  You might even be denied access forever, unless you change your password.

And to change your password, it must not resemble the original password which you have forgotten, remember?

This is tricky business.  And don’t shoot yourself in the foot by making your password too long, involved or elaborate.  This is because you may be forced to type that thing using a TV remote control device which is a difficult device to master.

Have you taken a memory test, otherwise known as a cognitive test, lately?  I have.  It’s a cinch compared to trying to get into your Fort-Knox protected cable TV account.  “All I wanted to do was pay my bill,” she exclaimed.

You also should not make your password too easy, simple, or hackable for your average second-grader.  For example, the 1234… stuff mentioned above.  Oh, and don’t use the password which you have used for any other entrance test.

They try to tell you that all these hoops we must jump through to get anything done these days is for our protection.  Let me be clear, they are not protecting my mental health.  There is no protection from the password police, for my potentially exploding brain.  I’m at serious risk, here.

Today, there is such a thing as “identity credentials.”  You simply are not who you are without proving it to some yahoo.  In the Bible, the word shibboleth was used as a password to establish your identity.  That word literally means “ear of corn,” or “flood.”

Do you know that the rainbow was once considered a promise from God that He would never again, as in Noah’s flood, destroy the earth.  I wonder if there’s a way that God would kindly just give each of us just one shibboleth to last a lifetime, you know, kind of like a social security number, unique to each identity.

And keep the hackers at bay, minding just their own business.  There is this cartoon reel rolling around in my head, where a crazed lunatic type character is hacking the heck out of a row of block letters, sort of like passwords.  In fact, this creature is happily hacking all the puzzles resembling passwords, to unlock my accounts – you know the ones where you must match all the pictures with bikes in them, or match the parts of a bridge, or crosswalks, or traffic lights.

This is not fun, people.  Seriously.  If I want to play a matching game, I’ll find some internet mahjong or something.

I like good jigsaw puzzles.  I’m not bad at matching patterns, color, and shapes.  It’s an easy challenge, if there is such a thing.  There is a sense of accomplishment when you finish a puzzle; like when you manage to enter a website or convince a customer service representative that you are who you are and that you belong there.

But by then, you probably forgot why you wanted to be there in the first place.  Oh well, you finally remembered your password.  However, your sense of accomplish vanishes because you changed that bloody shibboleth the last time you tried to prove who you are.   And the pattern continues.