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Episode 3 (Five best tools for opening wine and guest Natalie Hart)

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Spark My Muse – Episode 3 (5 best tools for opening wine and guest Natalie Hart)

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Spark my muse is The podcast for curious creatives types, wine newbies, and those willing to put up with my occasional silliness. Thank you so much for sharing your time with me.

This episode is brought to you by:
Life As Prayer: Life As Prayer: Revived Spirituality Inspired by Ancient Piety

Today’s wine segment!

I open dozens of bottles of wine per week as a manager of a wine tasting room at Spring Gate Vineyard. We use a simple tool, I hadn’t seen before to make it quick and simple with very high levels of success.

BASICALLY only the cork should get screwed. No broken corks, no puncture wounds–for you!

Cork screw is also called a wine key, or a waiter’s pry.

There are a few tools that are poor choices for opening bottles….

There are the best tools which may include some you may want to avoid.

These (affiliate) links will get them for you at a good price.

• Basic lever corkscrew – very inexpensive, small and portable, comes on an army knife. (There’s a better option below…keep reading.)

• Electronic one – large, slow, overly complex for my taste. It can be glitchy, run out of power…

• Winged or butterfly…It has arms that go up as you twist it down into the cork…Easily can cause broken corks when not done right. (Tip: hold the arm down tightly until you get it firmly pinned down to the cork and begin twisting straight down.) It’s slow, and has higher failures.

• The rabbit style. Large, more complicated than necessary. Table mounted options. If you have the room, like a full bar in your house…go for it.

• Air pressure bottle opener. It uses a needle CO 2 80 bottles…meh.

What’s the best tool?

The 2 lever waiter’s corkscrew!
It’s portable,fast, and low tech. The secret is the double hinge. It only takes about three rotations. (TIP: Go straight down and use the lever to pull the cork straight up. Don’t crank the cork to the side. First you use the top lever and then you switch to the bottom one.)

Here’s a video of the same tool I use at work and how to use it. Skip to minute 1:00.

Spark My Muse guest:
Writer – Natalie Hart

• Natalie’s Webiste
• Her book: The Giant Slayer

We discussed:

• Biblical fiction genre

• Her favorite way to get unstack creatively

• Identity (David’s, and the rest of us.)

Thanks for listening / reading. Please subscribe, or leave comments. I’d love to hear if you like the show.

For just $1 you can help the show purchase better sound equipment for better quality in future podcasts!

Special perks and rewards are available too. Join with the Spark My Muse community at the Spark My Muse page at Patreon! Click the image for more info.

Writing for the 2% -publishing

Screen Shot 2015-03-28 at 10.39.42 AM The cost is prohibitive. Monetary success is doubtful. Potential buyers (probably you) will wince, and balk and hem and haw and most will click away…

So why bother?
I wrote a book for the 2%. It’s something I had to write down for my kids, and to leave something behind that I want to be most remembered for. That path means you have to do it differently, because–to put in bluntly–publishers want a sure-sell and are trying to make money. They don’t care about the things I care about.

I raised the money to make this book. In 2 days on Kickstarter I got the funds to do design it and do a small run and mail off copies to those who funded it. Now I’ve put it on the market at a high price. Chances are you won’t want to buy it. If you do, you will understand why I had to do it. There just isn’t another way–and that’s okay.

I give (and have given) a lot of things away here at the website. Resources, information, tips, ebooks, graphics, etc, and I plan to write more things and create more things at modest prices. But, not for this one. It’s high-end and worth a different route.

If you get a copy, let me know what you liked the best about the book.
I hope you enjoy it!

xo
~Lisa

The Familiar Enemies

Risk Below are some of my “field notes” I collected from this extended and uncut interview with Brené Brown on Krista Tippet’s show “On Being”

[emotionally toxic / unhealthy] people suffer from similar traits:

• Perfectionism

• Self-righteousness

• Tying self-worth and personal value to productivity and success

• Wanting to perform and get validation

• Using exhaustion as a badge of honor

• The quest for certainty

Quote/snippets
• The enemy of creativity is comparison.

• Vulnerability is the core the heart and the center of meaningful human experience.

For woman the biggest fear/risk looks like this: “do it all and do it well and look perfect doing it”.
For man it looks like this: “do not appear to be weak”.

If people have never really struggled with adversity it shows up as hopelessness.

Hope is not an emotion; it’s a cognitive behavior process that is a function of struggle [and resiliency]. It doesn’t happen in the absence of pain or when we are spared pain.

Our defining moments (what makes us who we really are) happen not in joy but in adversity.

(Vulnerability is uncertainly, risk and emotional exposure ….and it’s courage. —my note: all things artists and innovators MUST have.)

When we don’t have space to be vulnerable and have fears we become dangerous.

If these sound like helpful, juicy nuggets to you, listen here:

on Waiting…

This Sunday marks the start of the season of Advent 2015.

The predominant theme of Advent is WAITING in expectation.
It’s a timeless theme.

stranded-new-york-workers-wait-patiently-in-a-long-line-to-use-a-phone-booth-to-call-home — (Before mobile phones, if a bus broke down you had to find a pay phone and wait your turn to call for rescue. These folks don’t seem too upset by it.)

Waiting makes up a big portion of our lives, doesn’t it?

Whether it’s waiting in line or in traffic or waiting for an occasion or certain situation–we do a lot of waiting.

For me, a focus on waiting pulls me out of the present moment to a moment that exists in theory. It involves hope or anxiety. Or both.

The prisoners I minister to have a life centered on waiting for their freedom. They routinely tell me that keeping busy is the best way to conquer the burden and stress of waiting.

But a closer interaction with the experience of waiting can unearth and reveal deeper spiritual longings that can both call us into a richer walk of faith and engender the growth needed to more fully surrender to God.

If we just stay busy we can miss the gifts that come only through waiting.

Because waiting is such a huge part of the human experience, it’s no wonder that Christianity has long interacted with this theme as a entry point into bigger spiritual conversations and concepts. It is through this struggle we gain growth and maturity in our walk of faith.

Patience is rarely, if ever, attained by any other means than practice.

Waiting is that practice.

Waiting on the Lord is a vibrant theme in Scriptures too, right?

Most of the stories in the Bible include the aspect of waiting. Abraham and Sarah (and many others) wait for offspring, David waits on the Lord for deliverance, the prophets wait for God’s promises to be fulfilled, Paul and the other apostles do a lot of waiting in prison, and in the season of Advent we acutely encounter Mary’s waiting for the Savior, Jesus. She is the vehicle God has chosen to birth the Prince of Peace. It’s a nine month process–on the heels of thousands of years of waiting for the Messiah.

This delivery involves a lot of anticipation and waiting.

And so too does most anything else of worth. These many stories echo our own pain and struggle.

I appreciate Mary’s expression of gratitude during her wait (a.k.a. The Magnificat-see the video below to hear “Mary’s Song” sung my John Michael Talbot). We can use her example to help us along.

Gratitude produces joy that makes waiting easier.

Waiting aptly exposes our traits of impatience, also. It works to refine us.

Henri Nouwen once wrote, “Impatient people are always expecting the real thing to happen somewhere else and therefore want to go elsewhere. ”

Rev Adele Ahlberg Calhoun recently wrote,

Waiting is how God gets at the idols of our heart. Waiting addresses the things we think we need besides God to be content: money, comfort, expedience, success or control.

TODAY’S NUGGET:

It’s a powerful lesson we find in Advent. Meditate on the longings of your heart and cultivate the seeds of advent there. Expectantly wait for God to fulfill his promises with a heart of trust and gratitude.

Humor Series: Funny to Whom?

funny-old-lady-smoking

Have you heard this one?

Three Humor Science researchers walk into a bar. ….um. Wait. That won’t work. Let me start over.

Get a scientist to talk about humor studies and you get a quick reminder of how science can squeeze the life out of anything.

Dissection is destructive. But no more!

It’s time to find out in a better way:

1. What do people find funny and why?

2. How can YOU become more humorously winsome?

3. How can science and an understanding of human nature and spirituality help us find out?

That’s what this series will be about, and I promise that it won’t be as dull as it’s been when scientists have the mic.

If it’s successful, a long form project will go a lot further and get a lot funnier. That’s up to you.

Here’s the story of how it all started:

A friend of mine asked me to speak at a senior residential home on the topic of community. No problem. I speak at plenty of places on plenty of topics. I wrote my bullet points and picked out an outfit…and then things went bad.

The problem?
I didn’t know she was billing me as “hilarious”.

I found that part out only a few days beforehand. I went into a quiet panic. The kind where your hands get clammy and your sweat smells like bad coffee. You run out of TUMS at times like this.

I’d planned on being friendly and informative, not uproarious. I was going to present material and involve them in cute bonding activities, not split their sides in gales of laughter. My friend had been walking around assuring residents that I was the funniest thing going.

Now what?

Maybe, I could stick a joke in there somewhere:

“Have you ever peed your pants laughing? What a silly question–you’re old people. You peed your pants getting out of bed today. Is bladder incontinence a laughing matter? …Depends.”

Depends is right. This wasn’t going to work.

What if they hated me? Some of them are in chronic pain. Some are grouchy. Some have little patience for sassy youngsters. These people carry canes and some smell like pee.

I could get the beating of my life! And I would deserve it.

The terror of bombing at the place drove me to research the topic of humor scientifically.

My purpose was to help these folks have a good time, not offend them.

What resulted was a quest and many discoveries. I had to find out if funniness can be learned, if public speaking can be improved with a formula, if laughter can be predicted, and if old people laugh at jokes about physical deterioration and, if so, under what conditions.

Well, it turns out the last bit is sort of tricky. More on that in future material.

On getting funnier

My research dug up a very good find and it might help you too:

One of the ways almost anyone can get funnier to more people is to appear harmless more broadly.

Does that seem counter-intuitive?
Yes, there are foul-mouthed, raunchy comics aplenty and seem to get lots of laughs, but they are not typically funny to the greatest numbers of people compared to plenty of other things (pies in the face, mistaken identity antics, prat falls, kittens jumping in surprise), and there is a scientific reason why.

What more people (on average) actually find funny hinges on giving them something that is funny at a further comedic distance. This explains why Jay Leno, Jerry Seinfeld, and Bill Cosby (before all that drugging women stuff was found out) have huge followings and continued success, and Roseanne Barr gets more annoying as time goes by.

What is Comedic Distance?

Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.

-Mel Brooks

In this quote, Mel Brooks underscores what humor researchers are finding empirically true. Distance matters a lot.

If your child falls off the playground slide and bangs himself up, it’s scary. If some man in a cowboy hat suddenly gets kicked in the crotch by an aggressive llama, it’s laughable.

The Kitten vs. Stern Proof

This is why videos of kittens doing silly things trump in spades the popularity of Howard Stern and his radio show antics. The hoards of memes, shares, and overall fans of funny kitten videos means that invariably, kittens kick Howard’s butt. Big time. Kittens won’t squash your dearly held values. Kittens won’t say something gross about bodily fluids. (Kittens are not funny to everyone, but they are funnier on the whole than a raunchy DJ or vulgar comedian. No contest.)

The difference between kittens and Howard Stern is this: Something “dangerous” isn’t personally threatening when kittens are involved.

Comedic distance (whether physical, chronological, or emotional) creates an amusing incident. The surprise pays off and people are thusly amused. If not, that you can get booed.

For me, I played off that my normal Thursday afternoons are spend with prison inmates and that I was REALLY happy for the upgrade.

I was then heckled by a woman who said,

“Don’t be so sure.” (She has it in for a few of her neighbors. It’s been ugly.)

To which I replied, “Well, you are all much better dressed.”

Resounding laughter. A win!

So, see if you can figure out why the photo above is funny (to most people)?

Answer:
The woman has made it to 100 years old and she’s done it her way.
Sure, smoking is dangerous, but apparently not much, in her case.

Having fun?

I hope you are enjoying this series.

Do you have questions about humor theory or getting funnier?
Let me know.

-Lisa

Here are the previous articles in this series:

1. Finding things funny…from birth

2. Humor Studies: Step 1 – Tickle Rats

For the latest info on my humor related projects sign up here.

Shownotes Spark My Muse – Episode 3 (5 best tools for opening wine and guest Natalie Hart)