In "Slaughterhouse 5", Chaplain's Assistant Billy Pilgrim is kidnapped by Tralfamadorians, extraterrestrial aliens who can see in four dimensions and have already seen every moment of their lives. While they cannot change anything about their destiny, they can choose to focus upon any moment in their lives. All time is fixed, but each moment is instantaneously accessible, which means each moment basically exists forever.
As they do not understand free will, the concept of free will and change is hard for a Tralfamadorian to understand. They believe it to be a bizarre fiction of 
Earth, where individuals who cannot see in four dimensions need an explanation to why things happen. In this scenario, there is little incentive to live life well (however you choose to define well), for as long as each life has a few good moments to re-visit eternally, you could be eternally content.
Billy latches on to this belief, and he becomes "unstuck in time", experiencing past and future events. As he "travels" backward and forward in time, he relives occasions of his life, including his death. Billy does not have the control these alien’s possess, as he can not control his time travel or choose to remember only what he wants to choose, and he relives happiness as much as he relives sadness. Without free will, there is no time wasted on blame, guilt or punishment. Billy accepts that things happen as they happen and does not blame anyone for what he experiences in the war, for the death of his wife, or for...anything.
While I am sure the Tralfamadorians would disagree, our lives are a series of things, our minds playing a critical role in how our many experiences shape us. On the outside chance I won't run into any aliens who can teach me to focus for an eternity on one single thing, I choose to acknowledge I do not and cannot know what the future holds. We are who we are because of what we have done, intentionally or unintentionally, successfully or or through defeat. We attract and repel along the way, forces of physics and psychics, our most profound truths found unexpectedly through experience.
So it goes.
Cave drawings, clay tablets, papyrus, wax tablets, parchment, paper, the printing press, bound books, paperbacks, audio books, e-readers. For centuries humanity has used linguistic symbols to transmit and conserve information. From silk in China to dried palm tree leaves in India, various materials have been used for recording and transmitting information.
With the proliferation of books came the need to study them. When time and resources are in short supply, readers look for a summary, an abstract, a condensed version, the "Reader's Digest" format: short, sweet, and to the point. As a student, I reveled in the existence of Cliffs Notes, guides that present and explain literary and other works in short order. Cliffs Notes o
we their start to Coles Notes, published in Canada. Nebraska native Cliff Hillegass obtained the American rights in 1958 and the rest, as they say, is history, spawning an entire genre that includes Spark Notes, For Dummies, Complete Idiot's Guides and now...Shakespeare via short cartoons with Elizabethan English translated into contemporary slang in just about seven minutes, courtesy of Cliffs Notes.
Oh, the wonders of the modern age.
And yes, just to clarify, I am here to praise CliffsNotes Films, not to bury them, for this good will live after them.
Things evolve; it is the way of the world. There are those who will find these versions of the work of the Bard of Avon blasphemous and insulting. Is it Shakespeare if it isn't done in Elizabethan English? Is is still Shakespeare when is it made into a movie, or made into a movie and contemporized? Does it matter how the message gets out? As Marshall McLuhan famously said, "The medium is the message." The form of the medium tends to embed itself in the message, creating a relationship whereby the medium influences the perception of the message. I readily admit I recall Polonius' advice to Laertes about "Neither a borrower nor a lender be" best by remembering the musical version of Hamlet from Gilligan's Island. Does it make the message of Hamlet any less important that it was delivered through a comic medium?
Each of us has a marvelous approach to storytelling, and we all do it differently. CliffsNotes Films is using this technology to reach out to audiences in a new and entertaining way. Does it matter how the story is told, as long as it is told? After all, "All the world's a stage..." (As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII).
CQD is one of the first distress signals adopted for radio use. It was announced on January 7, 1904, by the Marconi International Marine Communication Company. Telegraphs used "CQ" ("sécu" of sécurité) to help identify messages to all stations along a telegraph line, and CQ had been adopted as a "general call" for maritime radio use. Telegraphs had no general emergency signal, so the Marconi company added a "D" ("distress") to CQ in order to create the distress call. CQD was understood by wireless operators to mean, "All stations: distress."
Used worldwide by Marconi operators, CQD was never adopted as an international standard, as it could be mistaken for CQ when reception was poor. In 1906, Germany's Notzeichen distress signal of three-dots/three-dashes/three-dots was adopted as the international Morse code distress signal and became known for the letters it spelled out, SOS.
In 1923, a senior radio officer at Croydon Airport in London by the name of Frederick Stanley Mockford was asked to come up with a word that would indicate distress and was easily understood by all pilots and ground staff in an emergency. Much of the traffic at that time was between London and Paris, so he proposed the word "Mayday" from the French m’aider, where "venez m'aider" means "come help me."
Emergency telephone numbers such as 911 (in the US), 112 (in the EU) and 999 (in the UK) put you in contact with local emergency services for assistance.
As CQD, SOS, Mayday and the rest of the cornucopia of options indicate, we know how to ask for help in emergency situations. However, asking for non-emergency help is something many people have trouble doing. There is no hesitation to call for medical assistance when a person is injured, but we are much less likely to reach out and ask for help with work assignments, child care or the like.
Some believe it is a sign of weakness, so we try do to it ourselves and sometime do nothing instead, allowing the problem to grow into a crisis. We are a society largely based on helping ourselves. If you doubt that, take a good look at the self-help section the next time you are in a bookstore or library.
Despite the self-help mantra, the biggest mistake we can make is thinking we have to do everything ourselves. If we want it done right, we don't have to do it ourselves. Asking for help can boost our happiness; the assistance makes our life easier and it shows we have a supportive social network we can rely on in times of need. Not only does it increase our happiness, but also the happiness of who you are asking for help, as giving support is just as important as getting support. Think about it: asking someone for help means you have a positive relationship with that person and trust them to support you. Who wouldn't feel good about that?
It was Mark Twain who said "The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer somebody else up." When you ask for help, your call will be answered, and both of you will feel better. All you have to do is ask.
Earth, where individuals who cannot see in four dimensions need an explanation to why things happen. In this scenario, there is little incentive to live life well (however you choose to define well), for as long as each life has a few good moments to re-visit eternally, you could be eternally content.
