I Will NOT Do This

Yes, I blog about my family. I hope, however, that I'm not as embarrassing a parental (and spousal) blogger as this. I share the occasional funny story, a family trip, but I try not to go overboard. This is the Daily Me, after all, not the Daily Way Too Much of Me.

This kind of reminds me of a poetry-writing class I took at university (I know; taking a poetry class in such an atmosphere just begs for misbegot souls). There were plenty of the misbegot there. One fellow wrote incessantly, in free verse, about his visits to his psychiatrist. Of course, I never knew if they were real visits or imaginary visits, I just know we all got to a saturation point about his inner workings and gleeful angst pretty quickly. Maybe it was theraputic for him to write all of his inner thoughts out. That's fine. I do the same thing. I just don't share them in a public forum where my real or imaginary troubles can bore others.

Moon Bombing!

There are times I wished I worked for NASA, and watching this video made today one of those times. How cool is it to have a satellite the size of a bus crash into the moon to send up ejecta so it can be scanned for water?

I do wish I could have been there, floating above the moon, to see this happen. One day, maybe, we'll have moon colonies and moon shuttles and moon pies and I can go up there to see a few things. Do some prospecting.

Dumb As A Rock

I should probably say this somewhere along the line:

I still feel dumb as a rock.

Yes, I have that master's degree. But each day older I get, the dumber I feel. There's so much to know out there, and there's no way to keep up with it all. Not that I'm trying. But I do know this: I've got to keep up learning stuff, especially when it comes to communication and journalism -- which is still part of my career -- so I can keep up with the rest of the running pack.

Congratulations, President Obama

Just before I woke up, I thought I heard things exploding, like the morning-glory seeds I'd tossed on my weed fire last weekend. Now I know what I heard: The heads of local Republicans exploding on the news that President Barack Obama has won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.

I have to admit that my first reaction was: What for? He hasn't been president for a year. Is this a knee-jerk reaction from the Anyone-But-Bush crowd in Europe?

Obama has accomplished a bit on the international diplomacy front, re-kindling friendly relations between the United States and, frankly, the rest of the world. So I believe the prize, while early in his career, is merited. Not to forget the work he's done on reducing nuclear weapons stockpiles. I for one have to applaud efforts to get rid of bombs.

Update: The Nobel Committee explains its choices in this Associated Press article:

"Some people say — and I understand it — 'Isn't it premature? Too early?' Well, I'd say then that it could be too late to respond three years from now," Thorbjoern Jagland, chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, told the AP. "It is now that we have the opportunity to respond — all of us."

"If everything goes wrong, then one cannot say that this was because of Barack Obama," Jagland said. "It could be that it is because of us, all the others, that didn't respond. But I cannot exclude that Barack Obama also can contribute to the eventual failure."

Give Gil a Lick

See if any of this sounds familiar:

X had lent $36.6 million in insured deposits to a developer who had used the money to acquire ninety-nine acres of land, including thirty-one acres under water. From most indications, it looked as if the only thing you could do with the land was park submarines. An appraiser said the ninety-nine acres was worth only $12 million. But X had approved the $36 million loan assuming that the land would rise in value once the developer used it for a lake and a resort that would include 170 condominiums and a hotel. The $36 million loan earned X huge fees. But it was like lending someone $300,000 on a house worth $100,000 and gambling that the thing would more than triple in value once it was remodeled.

Or this:

Confused as how such a debacle could occur, and understandably irate, American taxpayers started demanding some scalps, and the politicians who had willingly taken all of that campaign money graciously offered Y’s. A vigilante atmosphere evolved in which demagoguery and demands for harsh punishment flourished. Y faced an unsettling prospect: He might become a victim of the very scandal he helped create.

Or this:

Z is far more than a financial crisis; it is a political crisis of the first order. It represents what happens when a nation’s political system becomes rotten with self-interest, when raising money to stay in office becomes more important than the common trust, and when the average citizen becomes insulated from reality, be it by deposit insurance, ignorance, or indifference.

The common thread, of course, is greed. But if you think these quotes are in relation to the current economic crisis – be it the decline of GM and Chrysler or the unprecedented failures among US banks and banking interests, you’d be off by about twenty years. These quotes are from James O’Shea’s book The Daisy Chain, which outlines the savings and loan crisis of the mid 1980s, a crisis that cost the American taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars and was caused by people wanting to get a hold of that brass ring and give it a lick, just like poor Gil Gunderson.

O’Shea’s is the first book I’ve read on the S&L crisis. (The “Z” in the third paragraph; X refers to Vernon Saving and Loan, a Texas S&L at the heart of O’Shea’s book while Y refers to Don Dixon, the guy who drove that particular S&L into the ditch.) What I appreciate the most about the book is it’s balanced approach. Rather than providing scalps or scapegoats, O’Shea details how nearly everyone involved in the situation, from the S&L officers to investors to politicians to the public at large, contributed to the problem and how they ought to share the blame. It’s an excellent lesson that we all should be learning, especially in the light of our current banking crisis. We ought to be looking less for scalps and more at what we can do as citizens, politicians and organizations to get our houses in order and keep them that way.

O’Shea’s treatment of the material is amazing. While he blames Reagan-era deregulation of the S&L industry as a catalyst for the crisis, he has no sacred cows, blaming Texas and federal officials for making the crisis at Vernon worse than it could have been otherwise. He points out that this crisis, like many others we face and may face, are really crises of personality, in which strong personalities bully through the pumpkin patch and get what they want, while weaker personalities either sheepishly do what they’re told or encounter obstacle after obstacle in trying to do what’s right that they either give up, are forced out of authoritative positions or simply fade away. There’s also ample room here to indict both Republicans and Democrats, Republicans for insisting that the free market is all good and holy, and Democrats for believing that politics ought to play before rationality.

Oddly enough, reading the book makes me want to pay more attention to how things go at work. We all have the authority to question what’s going on, and to actually stop work if we believe things are proceeding in an unsafe or unethical manner. Not that I have had much occur in my little area that needs questioning, but at least reading this book is a reminder that I do have that ability.

Poetical Babblings

The following may appear in a future edition of the Sugar House Review, a Utah poetry magazine. Then again, they may not. A guy can dream. Now I know how Ren felt: I WROTE THAT POEM!

The Nine’s Eye

Nine is a happier number than six
smiles so sweetly
eyes wide open
Six is frowny
pouts, eyes drooping
scowly grimace
eyebrow frown
Six is a teacher
Nine is a clown

On the Inland Sea

Wind drops
ripples
not on water
on the inland sea
wind whips
waves
pulsing, fanning
on the inland sea
Whiskers weaving
heads drooping
dripping green
on the inland sea
Wind drops
drips of green
wending waves
on the inland sea
Wind whips
the green ship
green ship plying
on the inland sea

Bag of Snakes

neighbor called snake
knobby-kneed hunters wake
leggy shorts run take
paper shopping bag
squat and scoot to follow
open bag to swallow
neighbor lady pause to bellow
snakes approach the door
swim and squirm in grass
slippy fast to pass
smiling sweetly holding mass
in her little hands

Set the Filther Free

Auntie pulled
the auntie face
when I brought the mouse
to Auntie’s place
Little beasties,
auntie chided
are at their happiest
when outsided
Yer little mouse
is filth and germs
and auntie says
your mousie yearns
set the filther free
Yuk has no place
inside my house
so take it out
yer crawly mouse
Auntie sat
in rocking chair
stroking cat
mid flying hair
I looked at cat
suppressed a squirm
for from its rear
there hung a worm

Comore Loma Patchwork

under the cauldron
seething
breathing
over the leg-shapes
lowing
wandering
echo-flowing babble
flighty ragged rabble
stroke to seal the broken seam
slot in the rushing wind
Eyes dropping downward
searching
leaving
down at follied leg-shapes
gazing
wishing
misty greening
lampshades
honk-a-blowing
feathermades
Veeing on the northern beam
bleat in retreating wind

Saturn!

That Saturn has rings, we know. But the discovery of an enormous dust and ice ring distantly orbiting Saturn and that may explain the yin-yang appearance of the moon Iapetus is stunning. Makes you wonder what is going on out there, among all that ice and darkness.

The ring, as depicted here, tilts 27 degrees to Saturn's equator, matching the tilt and retrograde orbit of Saturn's distant moon Phoebe. As Iapetus, orbiting in the opposite direction, plows through this dust, astronomers speculate, the moon's leading face picks up the dust. The image here is of the infrared light reflected from the ring's tiny particles. The particles are so tiny, and so far apart, they say, the ring would be difficult to detect with the naked eye. More about the discovery is online here.

So the space around Saturn is just dusty, dusty.

This is why space exploration fascinates me. We think we've seen quite a bit in our own little solar system, and yet something as magnificent a this can go undetected until the right equipment is there and the right people are looking in the right direction. If only my math skills were a little bit -- well, a lot -- better, I'd be right there.

Zeal

As is the case with most crises, a viable solution isn't in some far (or even near) future position, waiting to descend and make everything better, but instead it's been there all along, under the radar, slowly building its momentum until the lumbering big guys notice it all.

Newsweek noticed it this week: The phenomenon of hyperlocal bloggers filling the void where traditional media (read newspapers) are asleep at the switch. Here are a few telling excerpts from Newsweek's story:

Until recently, a fender bender or a gas leak in Millburn, N.J., was treated like the minor event that it is. Then Jennifer Connic arrived in town. Connic, 32, is the editor of a Web site called Millburn.Patch.com, part of a chain of local sites called Patch.com, and since February she's been covering mundane events in this suburban town of 20,000 residents with a zeal most journalists re-serve for a big scoop. Connic shows up at so many auto accidents that for a time Millburn Fire Chief Michael Roberts began going too, just so he could deal with Connic's questions while his firefighters worked. At Millburn town hall, town administrator Timothy Gordon often spends part of his week alerting the Millburn Township Committee about what news Connic is likely to break next—so they hear it from him, not from her blog. For decades the locals got their news from a sleepy weekly newspaper, but now, with Connic, rival bloggers, and the "citizen journalists" they recruit walking the Millburn beat 24/7, Gordon sometimes has trouble staying abreast of town controversies. "They can come across problems before [town officials] know about them," Gordon says.

What counts here is not journalistic training, it's journalistic zeal. And, frankly, the ability to get away from the ease of merely spouting opinion on a blog but actually using a blog to convey factual, honest information to your readers. You won't find that much here because, even though I have a bachelors degree in journalism, I learned years ago that I do not posesss the zeal that is called for in a true community/citizen journalist. I'm much happier in the wooly world of fiction, thank you very much. But I am glad there are folks out there who are using the Internet for this kind of news purveyance, because it'll show the big guys -- end even the little guys -- something about journalism education and journalism itself.

What will it show? First, I think, it'll get us back to the era when a reporter didn't necessarily need a four-year degree. I'm not entirely sure that's a requisite now, but I can say this: The more I look back on the four-year degree I earned in journalism, the more I have to wonder why in that span of time nobody really talked about finding and maintaining that zeal. I suppose the assumption was that if a person wanted to be a journalist, that zeal was inborn, already there, or would be learned on the job. I can tell you that my journalism education left way too much to be learned on the job -- or those on the job frmo whom I was to learn these things were too busy doing something else to bother with an upstart like me, assuming, as I've already mentioned, that the zeal was there already. I'm not saying all journalists have had the zeal beaten out of them; I'm just saying it wasn't there in large amounts for me.

But this isn't about me, fortunately, because if it were left up to me, this is what we'd be hearing:

At times Gordon longs for the days when the weekly newspaper, The Item, was Millburn's sole watchdog. "It was slower, and [its] reporters mostly stayed in their office," he says. So Gordon is adapting. When the town's phone system went down recently, he relied on Patch to explain why town hall couldn't be contacted.

So I'll leave the hyperlocal reporting to those who have the zeal to do it. I don't feel bad about my non-participation. Given my butt-first exit from journalism in 2005, I'm not anxious to re-enter that world, and if there are those who want to go into that world through a blog, so be it. I'll support them, as long as they're newsy and not heavy on the opinion. And if they can keep troll posters under control, which is always a headache. And, of course, I'll continue my nonsensical ramblings here, writing for my tiny audience and otehrwise not being bothered that I do not possess the zeal that others engender.

What's interesting -- and what should be making newspapers shriek about this -- is that these people aren't necessarily doing all of this work for free. Newsweek continues:

Web-news guru Jeff Jarvis, director of the interactive-journalism program at the City University of New York, has done an extensive study of hyper-local economics, and he's optimistic. "The most startling and hopeful number I have found is this: some hyper-local bloggers, serving markets of about 50,000, are bringing in up to $200,000 a year in advertising," he says. That's small beans to big media companies, but if an operation like AOL's Patch can link together a network of $200,000-a-year sites each run by a single reporter, and then amortize big expenses (like technology and ad sales) across multiple sites, you could start to see decent profits. The low overhead is crucial: not only are startups like Patch using less costly labor, but they also believe readership and revenue will grow as networks of hyperlocal blogs link to each other, and as they become adept at persuading small businesses that never advertised in newspapers to give online advertising a shot—a key to Patch's strategy.

As a traditional newspaper reporter, I, of course, would freak if I'd been assigned as a single writer to cover an area of 50,000 inhabitants. That, of course, is one of the reasons I'm not in journalism any more. This is where the zeal enters in and, hopefully, where megaturds -- Dave Barry's phrase for stories that consume much of a reporter's time but are rarely read by readers -- are nonexistent. These bloggers have a chance to connect intimately with their readers, basically sending them the message: I'm doing this for you. What do you want to read here? If hyperlocal bloggers can match their zeal with the ability to produce what local readers want, there's the golden opportunity.

Part of me suspects that Newsweek's story, and Jarvis' numbers, are a bit Pollyanna, however. While zeal is commendable for reporters, I have to wonder how much that zeal will bleed into the world of soliciting these $200,000-a-year advertisers, and how much time that will take out of a blogger's time for actual reporting. A one-man show sounds appealing, especially for an individual with the zeal for showing up and asking annoying questions at accidents, city council meetings and the like. But the one-man show also implies running the advertising and business end of things. Zeal can only go so far.

Update October 7: There's a good discussion of hyperlocal journalism here. (Look for "Social Media and Journalism, there is no option to link directly to the post, oddly enough.) Doug Fisher here brings out a good point that hyper-local news has to be nurtured, and that such nurturing is likely to be more successful in areas with bigger populations.

Another Update: The "Reflections of a Newsosaur" blog has a nice little tale on the failure of a handful of Denver-based net papers, offering a demonstration of how just transplanting what newspaper journalism has done on print to the web just doesn't work as a business model. More stuff here, including experiments the failed Rocky Mountain News did with hyperlocal reporting.

Snow and Mock Apple Pie

Winter officially arrived today in the form of about two inches of the slushiest, wettest snow I have seen in a long time. It slapped with force against the sides of the bus as we drove out to work today, loud enough that it kept me awake pretty much the whole time out there. After a few more snowstorms, that noise will drift into the background and I won't hear it at all, but until then I'm looking for a few white mornings, literally and figuratively. This might explain why I'm so darned cranky tonight.

Then tonight we were fooled.

Michelle made an apple pie for us to have after Family Home Evening. As we were eating, I asked her if these were apples from the back yard. She said "Sort of," which should have activated my radar a bit more than it did, but I was too busy eating the pie to notice. I did note that the apples appeared a titch greener than usual, but that fact, too, neglected to register. After we'd all eaten, she gathered us into the living room and introduced us to the concept of Mock Apple Pie, made with zucchini. zucchini, sugar and cinnamon. It tasted really, really good. Fool the eye, of course, and you fool the brain.

Finally, A Good Use for Twitter

Oh, Dilbert. Always good for a laugh.

Now this is an ingenious use for Twitter. Convince a twit that it's the best thing since sliced bread and convince him to take it literally -- only let us know what you're doing at every moment. Then you're able to track his or her movements and always know when you have to go back to pretending to work.

Of course, the people I know that I'd like to track like this aren't the kinds who'd use Twitter religiously, which is unfortunate.