Here is a run only applescript that recites Reverend Robert Schuller's "Possibility Thinker's Creed".
Robert Schuller's Hour of Power television show inspires people to dream big dreams because God is the source of those dreams. To dream big dreams, you must face a lot of people who have given up and inspire them. You must face negative people with your positive faith. You can't really argue with them and anyway the biggest argument you will ever have is with yourself, so you shouldn't bother, but merely be a good example.
Now, I had this creed recited by the gala tea voice, "Ralph". I felt "he" needed that sort of self-affirmation. Why do I speak of a robot voice as if he were a he as opposed to an "it"? Could it be a new form of political correctness? You bet, especially when a human being proceeds to refer to themselves and others as an it. Shades of Martin Buber (Ralph is easier to understand)!
Here's why.
Years ago, I submitted a horrific dialogue in applescript by Mark Twain called "What is Man?". In it a small boy tries to build the case to a negative old man (something like my grandfather, who God bless him, was most of the time kidding about his negativity) for mankind deserving credit and capable of good acts of true courage and kindness.
The little boy was played by the voice "The Princess" (when I grow up I want to be a scientist).
The stroke stingy old man (not in anyways like my grandfather, but rather who my grandfather was preparing me for) was played by the gala tea voice, Ralph. Ralph keeps giving the little boy what Claude Steiner, father of the notion, stroke economy, in a transactional analysis fairy tale, called cold pricklies. He argues that man is merely a robot driven by logic alone and, like Ambassador Sarek, Spock's father on star trek said, "One does not thank logic, Amanda!" and like Mark Twain said, one does not thank an automobile.
The old man seemed a bit like the old boys in any scholastic field who have forgotten how to do research themselves and have their publication networks and get published, but keep after claiming that their inferiors, the grad students, aren't doing something essentially new, like they did in the good old days when men were men or whatever.
Now, it is a hard pill to swallow, but anyone with the least bit of training in possibility thinking knows that these are precisely the negative thinkers that a graduate student must "love and inspire". This is what makes a scholar. This is where he lives. This is where He lives.
So, I decided that Ralph, the old man, "deserved" to recite the creed, on behalf of a stroke starved humanity.
I actually attended Robert Schuller's church and, immediately after, Stanford Memorial Church. The actual psychological integration of devine scholastic cynicism and possibility thinking will be a very difficult life's work for me, but meanwhile let Ralph recite the creed, perhaps as a startup application.
Mark Alldritt, in Script Tools 1.3-1 in 1994 made the scripting addition, Speech, that allows applescript to use the gala tea voices. I don't know where he is now to thank or whatever. His work doesn't seem to be on the PHT hyperarchive.
Also, thanks are due Kurt Kaufman for getting me interested in the gala tea voices again with his sing mac program. Far out!
And very very much thanks to Apple Computer for their wonderful bizarre interface with which I can apply Alice in Wonderland logic to all the Ralphs of the world, like Jan Duffy at UT Austin relativity said so many years ago!
