A More Realistic Approach

It’s Monday. I’m back at work. And, actually, feeling pretty good about it. I had another job interview this morning – this time for a technical writing job very similar to the one I’m doing now, except that the workload seems to be brutally insane. I may take it anyway – if offered, and that’s a big if – just for the stability. I may also go insane.

I’m resigned now to waiting a good few weeks before I get too anxious about this job, or the other I’ve applied for. Apparently, they run background checks before they make any kind of announcement, or so I was told this morning. So we’ll see what happens.

Saturday night, I went back to my night owl roots and stayed up until about 3 am. I really miss that, because, in the wee hours of the morning, there are fewer distractions. Of course, I was working on a distraction as I stayed up late – a re-write of a paper fro one of my classes. I’m not sure it’ll even do me any good to have rewritten it, as I believe the grade book is now closed. But maybe, just maybe mind you, the prof saw enough potential in it he thought it needed more. Then again, maybe I’m insane.

Fourth of July coming up. We’ll celebrate the day in Driggs, Idaho, of all places. That’s where one of my wife’s nieces lives, and she evidently wants to have a shindig. So we’ll go. That means driving, but no real organization on our part, since the party won’t be at our house. That’s good news. I don’t like parties at our house. I like leaving the preparation and messes behind. Not that anyone out there really cares.

Camping with the Bumpuses

I've always wondered what it would be like to have the Bumpuses living next door. This weekend, we got to find out.

For those of you not familiar with the Bumpuses, shame on you. Find Bob Clark's fine film A Christmas Story. Watch it. Relish the few mentions of the unseen Bumpuses -- the hillbilly neighbors of the family in A Christmas Story question. The only Bumpuses you see are the hound dogs, but you can imagine what the family is like from there. We had them as neighbors as we camped at Green Canyon Hot Springs this weekend, and because of our mile-long clothes line, wiener dog and horde of children, we were the Bumpuses for the folks on the other side.



Green Canyon is a good place to find Bumpuses and other hillbilly-like people. Oh, they're friendly. But this is the only campground/hot pool where, to get from your campsite to the pool, you have to navigate a collection of ranch outbuildings, half-built guest houses, farm and road equipment in various stages of rust and decay, a bevy of dogs and one frenzied woman randomly sticking her head into flower beds to toss weeds out at passers by (to her credit, she was not trying to hit people, just generally not paying attention to who was walking by as she tossed her weeds).

I love the scenery, through. Green Canyon is home to Canyon Creek, a rather boisterous stream that chugs out of Madison County's Big Hole Mountains to join the Teton River before it flows through Rexburg, Idaho, about 25 miles distant. The creek has carved a rather deep canyon through the farmland and into the tuff lava rock below, exposing many weird rock formations, including one that looks like a cross between an Easter Island head and a pig. (I'm going to have to drive up there again, and, without children, walk out to the rock for pictures.) I did get pictures of the local flora, which abounds in the form of sage brush and random Idaho wildflowers.

But back to the Bumpuses. We were Bumpuses at first. We set up camper, tent, stole fire pits and picnic tables, then spread a very long clothesline through the campsite on which to dry our swimming suits and towels, plus a pair of socks Liam decided to wear for a jaunt through the dewy grass, the little fool. But we were out-Bumpused when the neighbors showed up, at first giving us the stinkeye because, I don't know, they're from Fremont County and that's their job. They set up their camp, with an even more ancient camper and even more kids tearing about the landscape. We felt right at home.

Back by Unpopular Demand . . . My SL Paper

Tipping the Balance:

Despite the hype, virtual worlds offer chances for professional communicators – if we're ready to take them

Brian Davidson (Second Life avatar, Jacob Rabinowicz)

We’ve heard it all before.

Back in 1961, then chairman of the Federal Communications Commission Newton N. Minow gave his famous “vast wasteland” speech in regards to the content of television:

“When television is good, nothing –not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers – nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there for a day without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit-and-loss sheet or rating book to distract you –and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland.”

Today, as professional communicators explore virtual worlds – notably, Second Life – as potential 21^st-century venues for professional collaboration, training, simulation and other work activities, much the same is being said about these worlds as Minow said about television – with the added wrinkle that, barring a power failure, network breakdown or server blow-up, these virtual worlds never sign off.

If we see these potentials in Second Life and other virtual worlds, it’s up to us to work through these worlds’ weaknesses to demonstrate that potential to those who hold the purse strings. We have to seize upon our professional interest in these worlds to tip the balance from vast wasteland to public interest.

Second Life and other virtual worlds do indeed have their weaknesses:

They gobble hardware	Calling for graphics cards, computer memory and Internet bandwidth that companies may balk at providing. According to Reuters, while Linden Labs, creators of Second Life, brag that only between 2 and 4 percent of the virtual world's regions deliver less than 35 frames per second as of December 2007, the average user has seen performance decline from 13.5 fps in April 2007 to 12.3 fps in December 2007. Linden Labs defines anything below 20 fps to be “very slow and laggy.” The slow frame speeds are due to end-user hardware not being up to Second Life's demands.
They offer temptation	Companies are already concerned about lost production time to the Internet in general; introducing virtual worlds to the world of work might seem an open invitation to goofing off. In the past three years, surveys conducted by Salary.com and AOL of an average of 2,500 bosses and employees per year show at least 43 percent of respondents admit to using the Internet for personal use while at work, marking the Internet as their primary time-waster. They also admit to wasting nearly two hours a day at work doing non-work tasks.
They’re the Wild West	The United States government ordered casinos operating in Second Life to shut down in July 2007, as on line gambling is illegal. Time magazine also says German officials are investigating allegations that traffickers in child pornography are using Second Life to exchange explicit material.
They’re unpredictable	In 2007, the so-called Second Life Liberation Army set off virtual nuclear devices near Second Life corporate stores operated by American Apparel and Reebok and also virtually gunned down American Apparel shoppers in a separate incident. According to Time, American Apparel and Starwood Hotels pulled out of substantial investments in Second Life in 2007, citing “low traffic and raunchy behavior.”
They're sparsely populated	In 2007, Linden Labs reported 2.3 million registered members – a number which increased to 8.7 in 2008. The number of active users, however – those who use Second Life more than just once a week – has lagged. In 2003, the number of active users was estimated by Linden Labs and outside consultants at between 200,000 and 230,000; in 2008, it has climbed – but only to 600,000.

These worlds’ greatest weakness, however, when it comes to applying them in the workplace, may simply be that there are other ways to use the Internet to bring people together to collaborate that companies already have – e-mail, wikis, voice and video conferencing, the simple telephone.

But we would be well to heed what Minow said in 1961 about novelty and its power.

The television industry in 1961, Minow said, possessed “the most powerful voice in America. It has an inescapable duty to make that voice ring with intelligence and with leadership. In a few years, this exciting industry has grown from a novelty to an instrument of overwhelming impact on the American people. It should be making ready for the kind of leadership that newspapers and magazines assumed years ago, to make your people aware of the world.”

Today, the Internet wields that power. Second Life and similar virtual worlds, though novelties now, are part of that disparate Internet world where the vast wasteland is battling with the public interest in the form of universities offering classes, businesses recruiting new hires, doctors working with patients in virtual rehabilitation and, somewhere I’m sure, professional communicators meeting, collaborating, working and celebrating when their work is done.

In a small way, I’ve participated in such an inroad. In pursuing a masters degree in technical writing from Utah State University, I took a course in the summer of 2008 with about a half dozen other students, in which we took a look at Second Life and how it could be used in our profession.

We started with two Second Life premises: One group would build virtual furniture and a virtual office we and others could use in Second Life for our meetings. The furniture and office were built in sandboxes – areas in Second Life set aside for building experimentation, free of charge. The other group, of which I was a member, would create in-world and real-world advertising for the furniture group, pulling together elements of Second Life as well as real life, including the use of real-life, formatted documents the furniture group could exchange and explore as they sought out ideas on what kinds of furniture to build next.

Ours was not a flawless exploration, nor did we find a virtual world free of flaws that inhibit professional use of virtual worlds. Second Life, for example, offers no easy way to exchange formatted documents, and even makes bringing computer slide shows and videos into the world a bit more difficult than it should be. As Second Life’s many critics have pointed out, there are simply easier ways to do these kinds of things – either through a group wiki or Web site, using the services of Web sites such as issuu.com to post and exchange documents or merely picking up the phone or sending an e-mail to collaborate. “It could just be me, but I don’t see the usefulness of [Second Life,]” writes John Sheesley, a section editor at Tech Republic, a popular news and discussion Web site for those in tech-related industries. “I’m not sure what you can do with such a thing that you couldn’t do with just a conference call or NetMeeting,” he continues. “Maybe someone who’s more used to or comfortable with virtual worlds would find it beneficial, but I sure don’t get it.” And more: “You can run seminars and symposiums in Second Life. But why going to a seminar or meeting as an avatar is a good idea is beyond me,” writes Simon van Wyk at hothouse.com.au, an Australian web marketing blog. “People have been running these types of meetings for years using a range of tools. Webcasting, Netmeeting, IRC - these are important and they have shaped the Internet and our usage and expectations. Second Life just makes this harder to get to.”

We found, however, that behind the novelty, there are advantages as well, and that “getting it,” as Sheesley identifies as imperative, takes more than just experimentation with virtual worlds. Additionally, critics often forget that technologies like webcasting and Netmeeting were new once, too.

In some ways, I found Second Life to be more liberating than other collaborative tools I've used – from Basecamp to iVisit. I am, for example, generally a shy, inhibited person. If I can avoid using the telephone, I’ll do so. Collaborating with me over the phone is a painful experience. But as our group met in Second Life to discuss our project, that wall vanished. I chatted easily with my group members. We accomplished much in a short amount of time because Second Life allowed us to meet together, exchange ideas and collaborate with a second class group. Our project involved creating a communication and advertising campaign for another class group, which was designing and building Second Life furniture. Our group worked around some Second Life limitations, specifically the inability to create information-rich documents in Second Life itself. We, like many other Second Life residents, used current document-sharing methods, such as e-mail and posting documents to common servers where the entire team could read and comment on them.

As we worked, however, we discovered the process of collaborating in Second Life to be more valuable than the end products (the furniture and advertising campaign). That we worked together in Second Life to plan our various project elements helped remove Second Life from the world of novelty into the world of utility. Second Life allowed us to create a social environment – a critical point in a successful collaborative work environment, according to Nardi and Whittaker who advise focusing on “not what people communicate about, but [on] how they create a social environment in which they can communicate at all.”

There are many ways we could have communicated as we worked on our various projects, ranging from e-mails to messages exchanged in our on line classroom. We naturally sought out, however, the continuity of face-to-face conversations in Second Life (focusing on shared content and culture as we went about our virtual work, as recommended by Watson-Manheim, Chudowba and Crowston in “Discontinuities and continuities: a new way to understand virtual work”).

In other words, we sought out the sociability we could build in Second Life. “Face to face communication supports touch, shared activities, eating and drinking together, as well as informal interactions and attention management,” Nardi and Whittaker write. “We argue that these activities are crucial for sustaining the social relationships that make distributed work possible.” We didn't necessarily eat and drink together while in Second Life, but that we could all socialize and work in a single environment even though we were widely dispersed by geography and also experience is a wonderful testament to working in a virtual world. In our own brief excursion into Second Life, for example, we found:

• A group of people determined to use Second Life to collaborate and work in a professional manner can do so, without interruption from any in-world distraction.

• The Second Life learning curve, feared by many, does not necessarily apply. Even in our small class of about a half dozen, we had enough people who could learn how to build Second Life objects, recognize how Second Life could interact with other Web applications and how Second Life could function as a professional space at minimal or no cost to accomplish our work goals.

• We created an example of professional collaboration in Second Life we could show our real-life employers.
  

What may be most important about virtual worlds like Second Life is that they add to the variety of Internet-based tools we have at our disposal to make collaboration and the exchange of ideas simpler and more satisfying. Rather than fretting about composing an e-mail or memo, we simply met in Second Life and talked to each other, as we might over the telephone or beside the water cooler, taking advantage of the natural flow of conversation to guide us as we worked and to inspire us to take new directions we might not have considered had we been working though e-mail or other means, where communication is not done in real-time.

Continued development of virtual worlds may further contribute to those real-time exchanges. Studies such as the Metaverse Roadmap, conducted by the Acceleration Studies Foundation, could fuel further technological synergies, as long as the necessary hardware lies within the grasp of the average knowledge worker.

The foundation surveyed information technology experts and frequent Internet users to find out what they believe about the future of such technologies. The respondents predict that the “Metaverse,” a term taken from Neal Stephenson’s 1993 novel Snow Crash, which describes a virtual world in which people interact, learn and socialize as much as they do in the real world, will primarily be used for social interaction and communication, but that growing numbers of people will use such environments to earn money, to learn and even to exercise, as the growing phenomenon of the Nintendo Wii has already demonstrated. The study also explores how 3D technologies (such as Google Earth), virtual worlds (such as Second Life) and other computer applications ranging from animation to artificial life could shape the Internet in the future.

The roadmap also sees future utility in merging virtual worlds with the real world – or at least the real world in the form of Google maps and similar services. The future could see virtual avatars wandering Google Maps’ real streets, holding virtual meetings with real people in real representations of real places. “In time, many of the Internet activities we now associate with the 2D Web will migrate to the 3D space of the Metaverse,” the roadmap’s authors write. “This does not mean all or even most of our web pages will become 3D, or even that we’ll typically read web content in 3D spaces. It means that as new tools develop, we’ll be able to intelligently mesh 2D and 3D to gain the unique advantages of each, in the appropriate context. Like the Web, the Metaverse wouldn’t be the entirety of the Internet – but like the Web, it would be seen by many as the most important part.”

Today, that potential lies mostly untapped in virtual worlds, just as 25 years ago, the novelty lay in those new-fangled inventions, e-mail and the World Wide Web. They may appear weird and appealing only to a few – but that’s the same way many felt when CBS news began broadcasting Internet URLs along with their news stories. As time goes on, perceptions – and usefulness – change. Second Life has the potential to be either a western or a symphony – or a happy mixture of both, where those who want to be informed can gather just as easily as those who want to be entertained – and gather in ways that keep the professional decorum some seek.

The best way to do that may simply be to explore Second Life and use it professionally. Why wait, all explorers may say, when you can be the vanguard? Most of my fellow classmates, going into this virtual world, had doubts to its use. Eight weeks after entering Second Life, some of those doubts still exist. We’re skeptical that Second Life can be anything more than, as many critics on the Web have described it, a 3D chat room. But it seems premature to write Second Life off completely. Here are a few suggestions of what we can do as professionals to demonstrate to ourselves and others that Second Life and other, similar virtual worlds, have some potential:

Find other like-minded souls, both in real and virtual world	I, for example, have joined a Colorado Springs, Colo.-based group of professionals – ranging from teachers to writers to administrators – who are exploring how they and their companies can use Second Life as a communication and collaboration tool. Aside from its Second Life presence, the group maintains a website where members may exchange messages and ideas on how they're using Second Life in their professional environments.
Get deeply into the virtual world	This implies not necessarily settling in with virtual property, but rather finding people with similar professional interests in Second Life, starting a Second life group meant to attract like-minded individuals, and taking opportunities to participate in professional uses of Second Life, even if those uses at the time don't fit in with your particular career or company. I have spent time talking with people at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Second Life Island, and have participated in a few events there, focusing on recent successes in NASA's remote explorations of Mars. Though the gatherings aren't particularly oriented towards professional communicators, they provide ample example of how the site can be used professionally.
Get off the hype and onto the evidence	Find individuals within your own company who are interested in exploring Second Life's potential. Examine that potential together – outside regular working hours – and document it through the videos, photos and chat transcripts Second Life allows you to produce, so when you go to your employer formally to show how Second Life could be used in your workplace, you have the evidence to back up your claims.

Virtual worlds may be a novelty at the moment – but so was television. So was the Internet. As professional communicators, we could play a hand in easing Second Life and other virtual worlds past that novelty and turning it into “an instrument of overwhelming impact,” echoing Minow’s words about the potential of television, so many years ago.

A Few Professional Spaces

Jet Propulsion Laboratory

First, stroll through JPL and NASA's virtual space flight museum, which heavily features models and information on remote explorers and satellites currently plying the mysteries of the planet Mars. More importantly, attend one of JPL's regularly-scheduled meeting, which attract amateur space enthusiasts and professionals willing to discuss the ins and outs of the American space program.

SLURL (Second Life Uniform Resource Locator) : http://slurl.com/secondlife/Explorer%20Island/183/151/23.

Book Island Publishing Village

Second Life has a surprisingly strong population of publishers looking to find the next great novel, and many of them have gathered in this village, setting up storefronts where they sell books and offer contacts to budding writers.

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Book%20Island/222/213/36

IBM Virtual Business Center

IBM has perhaps one of the largest corporate presences in Second Life, and is using the space for on line meetings and as a demonstration of how to integrate thousands of existing company Web sites into a 3D environment.

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/IBM%20Business%20Center////

Fantasia (1940) - Ave Maria

Or Leopold Stokowski doing Franz Schubert . . .

Fantasia (1940) - Night on Bald Mountain

Can't beat Leopold Stokowski.

Who Reads an American Book?

This is coming out of the blue, so bear with me.

Several years back in a college poetry-writing class, we got to talking about Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote, and how the story has become a symbol of Spain. Someone in the class asked the professor if there were an American author whose writings have become a symbol of the United States. This professor said no -- that the nation was too young to have produced such an author.

That thought bugged me for a long time. So today, I present a few authors whose writings can be said to represent the United States:

• Sinclair Lewis. From Babbitt through Arrowsmith to It Can't Happen Here, Lewis' writings embody two quintissential facets of the U.S. culture: Migration form the small town to the big city and the desire to make fame and fortune without really having to work for it. Both Babbitt and Arrowsmith follow characters who have great ambitions but see their dreams tripped up in their own shortcomings, specifically (for Babbitt) his desire to conform and (for Arrowsmith) his desire for something constantly out of his reach due to fear of failure.

Reading Babbitt is a profound pleasure. Anyone who says they can't see a bit of themselves in George Babbitt is, frankly, a liar.

• John Steinbeck. No American author has better captured both the beauty and the ugliness of the American spirit. In The Pastures of Heaven and Cannery Row, he finds American character at its best, albeit flawed by the nature that makes us all human. In other works such as The Grapes of Wrath and In Dubious Battle, he identifies the side of Ameridan character that drives one to succeed at all costs, even if the costs are the lives and livelihoods of fellow human beings. Winter of Our Discontent is his most haunting novel, in which we find a character driven to despair by his pursuit of the American Dream.
  

I plan on adding to this list form time to time. Both of these authors, of course, paint a pretty gloomy picture of the American character. There are others who paint with different strokes and with brighter colors (James Thurber, L. Frank Baum and Mark Twain come to mind).

And Still Waiting . . .

I feel like Star Wars this week – A New Hope has arrived. Two, that is.

Got a phone call this morning on the job I interviewed for last week. The HR gal told me that no decision has yet been made. Bummer. I suppose it’s good that the decision is taking longer, perhaps they’re looking more thoroughly at the applicants. So hope is still alive.

She called, however, to set up another interview for another tech writing job I applied for over a month ago. That’ll come Monday. (Ironic: The spell check doesn’t like “tech,” and wants to change it to “retch.” Not far off, on most days.)

Of the two opportunities, I’d much rather have the first pan out, as the job sounds a lot more interesting and challenging, with possibilities of travel and advancement these procedure-writing jobs just don’t offer.

As far as my current job goes, the pressure is off as far as layoffs are concerned. We have two tech writers in our group who have opted to take the voluntary separation, so our supervisor here doesn’t think it’s likely we’ll see anyone go in this round. I hope that’s the case. Best case, however, is that I get to leave. Not that the job here is terrible, as I’ve said before. It’s just that the other opportunities are more promising.

Blockage Alert: The unofficial, official rumor is that there exists a "gentleman's agreement" between the various contractors out there that states they won't hire from eachother -- stealing employees, they call it. If you quit, fine, but if you're just job-hopping, or so the rumor goes, no deal. I don't believe it, at least not yet. Why interview me for two different jobs if you know the agreement is there? Besides -- I'm a subcontractor, a disposable employee living in an employment-at-will state, so who's to care if I happen to wander off?

Still Waiting . . .

I'm trying not to get paranoid or to lose hope. But I'm losing hope and I think there's someone out to get me.

Today was EAR day at RWMC. Been working on EARs now for quite a while -- they're the little procedures we follow if there's a fire, too much wind, too much propane or too much of whatever. They've been my responsibility since I started working here two years ago, and I think we're to the point now that after this next round of changes we might be able to put them away for a while. Until someone comes in and says they don't work, and theys tart adding thigns and then the whole ball of wax starts rolling along its sticky way again.

No word yet about the new job. Upper lip is stiff, but I'm losing my resolve. Maybe it's just taking them a while longer to make the decision than they thought. Maybe they've already made it and aren't contacting the losers (i.e., me) at all. That's likely what's happening.

Waiting . . .

It’s the worst kind of waiting. At least the worst kind of waiting I’ve encountered this week.

Last month, I applied for a different job. Last week, I actually had an interview for said job. Now I’m in that limbo, post-interview, pre-news (good or bad). I don’t like it.

You watch for those little tells. You seek a clue in everything possible. Did they call the boss? Did they not call the boss? Are they the type who won’t call the boss because the resume and interview were so impressive, or are they not bothering to call the boss because the applicant was, obviously, runt of the litter? Am I about to start a new journey, or continue on the current track, a little battered, knowing that expectations on the new track were not met?

I probably should not have read Barbara Ehrenreichs’ Bait and Switch, in which she describes nine months she spent as a professional similar to me trying to find a job – and the resultant despair. Hope without guarantees, as Tolkein would put it. Her book is good, but depressing. I certainly do not recommend reading it if you’re between careers, as I was in 2005.

I wait for the phone to ring. I wait for that tell-tale e-mail. I wait for the clouds to depart and for God to descend in a fiery chariot. I wait to do the chant Homer Simpson does when he gets his first job at the nuclear power plant:

I got the job! I got the job! Only in America could I get a job!

Here I sit, one generation of Simpsons . . .

I need help

Cleanup Crew

Hotel doormen
stand stately
on the fringe of the highway.
Politely waiting
for a road clear of taxis.
Strut to the yellow line
white epulets on the black suits.
Are they hotel maitre d's
or a kitchen staff of sorts
it seems as they pick
choice morsels
from the reddened, road-weary creature
not welcome to the rooms.

News Bits

First, the Tale of the Acommodating Alligator:

(from http://www.local6.com/, June 19, 2008, emphasis added)

VOLUSIA COUNTY, Fla. -- Three Central Florida deputies are being reprimanded after an officer was bitten and hospitalized by an 8-foot alligator.

I wonder if the alligator drove the ambulance as well . . .

Second, Fingers in the pi:

Most complex crop circle ever discovered in British fields

(Various internet sources)

The most complex, "mind-boggling" crop circle ever to be seen in Britain has been discovered in a barley field in Wiltshire.

The circle is a coded representation of pi to the 10th significant figure.

The formation, measuring 150ft in diameter, is apparently a coded image representing the first 10 digits, 3.141592654, of pi.

It is has appeared in a field near Barbury Castle, an iron-age hill fort above Wroughton, Wilts, and has been described by astrophysicists as "mind-boggling".

Michael Reed, an astrophysicist, said: "The tenth digit has even been correctly rounded up. The little dot near the centre is the decimal point.

"The code is based on 10 angular segments with the radial jumps being the indicator of each segment.

"Starting at the centre and counting the number of one-tenth segments in each section contained by the change in radius clearly shows the values of the first 10 digits in the value of pi."

Lucy Pringle, a researcher of crop formations, said: "This is an astounding development - it is a seminal event."

Mathematics codes and geometric patterns have long been an important factor in crop circle formations. One of the best known formations showed the image of a highly complex set of shapes known as The Julia Set, 12 years ago.

I just don't get it. How does anyone get pi out of this picture? I admit to not liking the subject of mathematics much. But I am familiar with pi, what it is, what it means. But I'm not sure whether this transcandental number has any cosmic properties beyond being common to any circle in the universe. But still, you get pi out of a bunch of jaggies and squiggles? I'd like an explanation that doesn't involve Jupiter aligning with Pluto, please.

And couldn't the aliens just land somewhere and say, "Hey, here we are! We know what pi is too, you know!" I'd be more impressed, frankly. [Insert rebuttals by tinfoil-hat wearers citing mankind's penchant for violence and xenophobia as a reason why aliens haven't taken the simple Horton Hears A Who! approach to contacting life on this planet.] So their way of proving moral and technological superiority is to make an artsy-fartsy representation of pi in some barley field in Britain? Cows make circular deposits in fields all the time, and it's quite likely if the sun were setting, you had your sun glasses on, squinted your eyes and tilted your head just so, you might (gasp!) see pi in a pie.

Third: LEGO heimlich?

THe Intertubes have been abuzz with an odd furor over Kellogg's LEGO fruit snacks. Folks seem indignant that this faceless American corporation (three words you always see together these days) would dare make a snack in the shape of LEGO bricks. They're worried, of course, their kids are going to mistake a real LEGO for a fruit snack LEGO and end up choking.

I have to wonder -- just how dumb to they think their precious snowflakes really are? I have three children. We have tons of LEGOs. We have purchased them LEGO fruit snacks. None of them, even the youngest (three) have done this feared switch-o change-o these pople are whimpering about. These kids know the difference between a real LEGO and a snack LEGO. Really. They're not stupid. Maybe these other people think they have stupid children.

No argument that kids younger than ours could get into trouble. But when it comes to putting inappropriate objects in their mouths, kids younger than ours are champion at that. My brother-in-law, as a baby, once devoured a dead moth he found on the floor. I, personally, nom-nomed an ancient, crusty, dust-coated marshmallow (marmello! I said with joy before I popped it in my mouth) when I was but a wee lad. So yeah, put a LEGO fruit snack and a LEGO on the floor in front of a real young kid, they'll probably put BOTH in their mouth.

But that's bad parenting (which we just don't have in America any more, unless the kid is famous or something, then we all tut-tut about it). It's much more exciting to whine about the FRUIT SNACK OF DEATH! We've bought into the media mentality that everything on this planet can KILL US, so we'd better BAN it, rather than just get a little smarter. (Read Michael Crichton's wonderful novel Airframe to get a better grasp on that.

Now I descend from my soapbox. Without OSHA-approved ladders or safety-net.

Bad Guy Things

Nothing about Second Life today. Nothing about job stress (Though I did have an interview for a new writing job today. Didn't totally botch it, so I may have a chance). Something light is needed. Something I call

Bad Guy Things

How would you like to be
the bad guy's horse?

Getting' whipped all the time
faster, faster, you fool, you fool!
Not many oats
and definitely no carrots

And while he's countin' the treasure
or kissin' the women
you're out in the stable
with the propositionin' donkeys
and the drunken stable boy.

How would you like to be
the bad guy's clothes?

So drab and black
smellin' of smoky disappearin' powder
never get washed
and always get caught
in the machinery
or the shark's mouth
when the baddie gets done in.

How would you like to be
the bad guy's sidekick?

Comic relief, sure that's fun
sometimes you get the best lines
and the little kids love you
because you're the stupid one.

But you still get stuck with the baddie
and have to break rocks in prison
or share the eternity
of the genie's lamp
no matter how many laughs you got.

How would you like to be
the bad guy?

Get the girl
until the stupid hero shows up.

Slink around in passages inside the castle walls
scare little children
do nasty bad guy things
make the poisoned apple
torture the prisoners
sit on the throne
while your dumb cronies dance around you
always have a plan
always have that plan foiled.

And have a moustache
and probably never change your underwear.

And no matter how dastardly you've been
that goody-goody
with the fairy godmother
and the forest animals that help out
She gets the happy ending
and leaves you to the wolves
or with a sword stickin' out
or in the insane asylum
wearin' that funny jacket.

Stupid heroes.
Without the bad guys
and our bad guy things
you haven't got the giant
the nasty tiger
the necromancer
the ring
or the story.

So as we Bad Guys are fond of saying:
Nyaah! Nyaah! Nyaah!

Professionalism and Second Life

Tipping the Balance:

If professional communicators see potential in virtual worlds like Second Life, it’s up to us to demonstrate that potential and help pull these worlds back from the Internet’s vast wasteland

Targeted for Intercom magazine

Brian Davidson
(Second Life avatar, Jacob Rabinowicz)

We’ve heard it all before.

Back in 1961, then chairman of the Federal Communications Commission Newton N. Minow gave his famous “vast wasteland” speech in regards to the content of television:

“When television is good, nothing –not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers – nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there for a day without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit-and-loss sheet or rating book to distract you –and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland.”

Today, as professional communicators explore virtual worlds – notably, Second Life – as potential 21st-century venues for professional collaboration, training, simulation and other work activities, much the same is being said about these worlds as Minow said about television – with the added wrinkle that, barring a power failure, network breakdown or server blow-up, these virtual worlds never sign off.

If we see these potentials in Second Life and other virtual worlds, it’s up to us to work through these worlds’ weaknesses – both real and perceived – to demonstrate that potential to those who hold the purse strings. We have to seize upon our professional interest in these worlds to tip the balance from vast wasteland to public interest.

Second Life and other virtual worlds do indeed have their weaknesses:

• They gobble hardware – calling for graphics cards, computer memory and Internet bandwidth that companies may balk at providing.
• They offer temptation – companies are already concerned about lost production time to the Internet in general; introducing virtual worlds to the world of work might seem an open invitation to goofing off.
• They’re obscure – Mention Second Life, The Sims Online, or Active Worlds, and you get a blank look from many over 30.
• They’re unprofessional – Those who have heard of these worlds are likely familiar with pop culture mentions on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, or new stories about Second Life gatherings being interrupted by penis storms. Sexually-oriented businesses, ranging from soft-core pornography to sites where avatars – computer representations of Second Life users – may engage in simulated sex are among the world’s most popular sites, seemingly stimulating Second Life’s growth as pornography stimulated the growth of AOL’s early dial-up Internet services and the triumph of the VHS videocassette format over Betamax.
• They’re unpredictable and somewhat anti-corporate. (Example: the so-called Second Life Liberation Army set off virtual “nuclear devices” near Second Life corporate stores operated by American Apparel and Reebok in an attempt to convince Linden Labs, the San Francisco-area company that created Second Life, to allow Second Life citizens the right to vote on in-world activities.)
• They’re misperceived – They’re games, aren’t they? Or, at best, a novelty. Second Life may give you a chance to walk around a virtual Paris circa 1900, offer a virtual NASA space flight museum and the chance to stroll a virtual Dublin – one of Second Life’s most popular spots – where you can virtually dance and virtually enjoy drinks in a virtual Irish pub. It all sounds like Jerry Seinfeld’s TV show: A place in between places, a place about nothing at all.

These worlds’ greatest weakness, when it comes to applying them in the workplace, may, however, simply be that there are other ways to use the Internet to bring people together to collaborate that companies already have – e-mail, wikis, voice and video conferencing, the simple telephone.

But we would be well to heed what Minow said in 1961 about novelty and its power.

The television industry in 1961, Minow said, possessed “the most powerful voice in America. It has an inescapable duty to make that voice ring with intelligence and with leadership. In a few years, this exciting industry has grown from a novelty to an instrument of overwhelming impact on the American people. It should be making ready for the kind of leadership that newspapers and magazines assumed years ago, to make your people aware of the world.”

Today, the Internet wields that power. Second Life and similar virtual worlds, though novelties now, are part of that disparate Internet world where the vast wasteland – in the form of twaddling, mundane conversation, senseless commercialization and mass attacks by giant virtual penises – is battling with the public interest – in the form of universities offering classes, businesses recruiting new hires, doctors working with patients in virtual rehabilitation and, somewhere I’m sure, professional communicators meeting, collaborating, working and celebrating when their work is done.

In a small way, I’ve participated in such an inroad. In pursuing a masters degree in technical writing from Utah State University, I took a course in the summer of 2008 with about a half dozen other students, in which we took a look at Second Life and how it could be used in our profession.

We started with two Second Life premises: One group would build virtual furniture and a virtual office we and others could use in Second Life for our meetings. The furniture and office were built in sandboxes – areas in Second Life set aside for building experimentation, free of charge. The other group, of which I was a member, would create in-world and real-world advertising for the furniture group, pulling together elements of Second Life as well as real life, including the use of real-life, formatted documents the furniture group could exchange and explore as they sought out ideas on what kinds of furniture to build next.

Ours was not a flawless exploration, nor did we find a virtual world free of flaws that inhibit professional use of virtual worlds. Second Life, for example, offers no easy way to exchange formatted documents, and even makes bringing computer slide shows and videos into the world a bit more difficult than it should be. As Second Life’s many critics have pointed out, there are simply easier ways to do these kinds of things – either through a group wiki or Web site, using the services of Web sites such as issuu.com to post and exchange documents or merely picking up the phone or sending an e-mail to collaborate.

We found, however, that behind the novelty, there are advantages as well. I am, for example, generally a shy, inhibited person. If I can avoid using the telephone, I’ll do so. Collaborating with me over the phone is a painful experience. But as our group met in Second Life to discuss our project (discussed in full here:)

that wall vanished. I chatted easily with my group members. We accomplished much in a short amount of time because Second Life allowed us to meet together, exchange ideas and collaborate with a second class group.

We also discovered the process – collaborating in Second Life – more valuable than the end products (the furniture and advertising campaign). That we worked together in Second Life to plan our various project elements helped remove Second Life from the world of novelty into the world of utility.

Thus enters the public interest of Second Life and other virtual worlds – much as it entered the world of television when Minow gave his famous speech. “Ours has been called the jet age, the atomic age, the space age. It is also, I submit, the
television age,” Minow wrote. “And just as history will decide whether the leaders of today's world employed the atom to destroy the world or rebuild it for mankind's benefit, so will history decide whether today's broadcasters employed their powerful voice to enrich the people or to debase them.”

The same will be said of the Internet, and of virtual worlds like Second Life.

Second Life and other virtual worlds will join the realm of public interest when those who participate there find ways to make it so. In our own brief excursion, we found:

• A group of people determined to use Second Life to collaborate and work in a professional manner can do so, without interruption from any in-world distraction, be it an unruly avatar or animated genitalia.
• The Second Life learning curve, feared by many, does not necessarily apply. Even in our small class of about a half dozen, we had enough people who could learn how to build Second Life objects, recognize how Second Life could interact with other Web applications and how Second Life could function as a professional space at minimal or no cost to accomplish our work goals.
• We created an example of professional collaboration in Second Life we could show our real-life employers.

What may be most important about virtual worlds like Second Life is that they add to the variety of Internet-based tools we have at our disposal to make collaboration and the exchange of ideas simpler and more satisfying.

The Metaverse Roadmap, a study conducted by the Acceleration Studies Foundation, has the aim of predicting how 3D technologies (such as Google Earth), virtual worlds (such as Second Life) and other computer applications ranging from animation to artificial life will shape the Internet in the future.

The foundation surveyed information technology experts and frequent Internet users to find out what they believe about the future of such technologies. The respondents predict that the “Metaverse,” a term taken from Neal Stephenson’s 1993 novel Snow Crash, which describes a virtual world in which people interact, learn and socialize as much as they do in the real world, will primarily be used for social interaction and communication, but that growing numbers of people will use such environments to earn money, to learn and even to exercise, as the growing phenomenon of the Nintendo Wii has already demonstrated.

The roadmap also sees future utility in merging virtual worlds with the real world – or at least the real world in the form of Google maps and similar services. The future could see virtual avatars wandering Google Maps’ real streets, holding virtual meetings with real people in real representations of real places. “In time, many of the Internet activities we now associate with the 2D Web will migrate to the 3D space of the Metaverse,” the roadmap’s authors write. “This does not mean all or even most of our web pages will become 3D, or even that we’ll typically read web content in 3D spaces. It means that as new tools develop, we’ll be able to intelligently mesh 2D and 3D to gain the unique advantages of each, in the appropriate context. Like the Web, the Metaverse wouldn’t be the entirety of the Internet – but like the Web, it would be seen by many as the most important part.”

Minow saw that potential, mostly untapped, in television. “I believe that the public interest is made up of many interests,” Minow wrote and said back in 1961. “You will get no argument from me if you say that, given a choice between a western and a symphony, more people will watch the western. I like westerns too, but a steady diet for the whole country is obviously not in the public interest. We all know that people would more often prefer to be entertained than stimulated or informed. But your obligations are not satisfied if you look only to popularity as a test of what to broadcast. You are not only in show business; you are free to communicate ideas as well as relaxation.”

Today, that potential lies mostly untapped in virtual worlds. They may appear weird and appealing only to a few – but that’s the same way many felt when CBS news began broadcasting Internet URLs along with their news stories. As time goes on, perceptions – and usefulness – change. Second Life has the potential to be either a western or a symphony – or a happy mixture of both, where those who want to be informed can gather just as easily as those who want to be entertained – and gather in ways that keep the professional decorum some seek.

The best way to do that may simply be to explore Second Life and use it professionally. Why wait, all explorers may say, when you can be the vanguard? Most of my fellow classmates, going into this virtual world, had doubts to its use. Eight weeks after entering Second Life, some of those doubts still exist. We’re skeptical that Second Life can be anything more than, as many critics on the Web have described it, a 3D chat room. But it seems premature to write Second Life off completely. While we still have doubts, we also experienced glimmers of inspiration and vision – one class member met a woman who helped a group set up a Second Life area used to rehabilitate people who had suffered strokes. Others attended Second Life Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Myself, I encountered many people sincere in the belief that valuable work can be done in Second Life, from discussions on NASA’s Mars Phoenix Lander to poets who joined together to write poems for hire.

Virtual worlds may be a novelty at the moment – but so was television. So was the Internet. As professional communicators, we could play a hand in easing Second Life past that novelty and turning it into “an instrument of overwhelming impact,” echoing Minow’s words about the potential of television.

A Virtual Vast Wasteland

The next week and a half will wind up the class I'm taking that involves Second Life. The last project: A paper that explores how Second Life could address (or, I suppose, compound) a technical communication problem/situation I've encountered in real life. At this point, I'm not sure where my paper will go (a draft is due Thursday, help). But I keep thinking back to this Dutch Kit-Kat commercial, and former FCC Chairman Newton N. Minow's "vast wasteland" speech concerning television in 1961:

When television is good, nothing -- not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers -- nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there for a day without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit-and-loss sheet or rating book to distract you -- and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland.

The same, I'm afraid, can be said for Second Life, except that the programming is more varied -- extremely good or extremely poor -- and it never shuts off. So if I don't know the direction the paper will go, at least I know the tone. Which, in retrospect, won't be as grim as this sounds. When Mr. Minow gave his speech, people (likely with the help of journalists) latched on to the "vast wasteland" sound bite, rather than focusing on the "public interest" he hoped to convey in his speech. He was vilified in the industry for making fun of the quality of television -- Sherwood Schwartz, producer of Gilligan's Island, named the S.S. Minnow after Minow as a comment on his perceived elitist trash talking. But Minow really did want people to remember the public interst portion of his speech more than anything else:

The television industry then, Minow said, “possesses the most powerful voice in America. It has an inescapable duty to make that voice ring with intelligence and with leadership. In a few years, this exciting industry has grown from a novelty to an instrument of overwhelming impact on the American people. It should be making ready for the kind of leadership that newspapers and magazines assumed years ago, to make your people aware of the world.”

He wanted television to take that power and use a portion of it to claim the high ground. That, in some ways, has happened. In many ways, it has not.

The same can be said now of the Internet, which wields the same kind of power television once weilded, as Minow outlines. On the Net, we see both the highbrow and the lowbrow. I think he'd agree today that the public interest versus the vast wasteland of the Internet is being ignored, much as it was in television's era.

Uncharted Retreat a Success

Since I haven't done any shilling for Uncharted.net here as of late, now is probably a good time. Uncharted, for the uninitiated, is a place where people can go to share their experiences with the places they love with other people across the world who are doing the same. Share stories, photos, videos and sounds of your favorite camping site, your favorite museum, your favorite out-of-the-way nook, but not your absolute favorite place, lest it become discovered and you get crowded out.

For example, here's a story going up on Uncharted soon, with pix:

Whistlers’ Campsite

Meadow Lake denizens willing to entertain, be entertained

In the shady patches behind boulders and thick stands of conifers, snow still lays piled at least a yard high. The calendar tells us this is the Fourth of July weekend, but it appears snow at 9,300 feet likes to stick around for the fireworks.

Where the sun shines through the trees to the ground, lithe wildflowers, yellow and white, blossom over a carpet of short grass and flowers that will turn into mountain strawberries.

To the south of this tiny alpine meadow, grey mountains loom, streaked with the white of snow and the tumbled black of avalanches bare of trees.

At their feet, Meadow Lake mirrors the blue sky, cirrus clouds, mountaintops – where the surface is free of winter’s ice.

Quiet.

The drip of water off our canoe paddles, the hollow bonk of wood against the aluminum boat.

Rushing water, tumbling down rocks; water white as snow still on the banks.

Reverent breath of air through the conifer boughs.

If we are quiet, Mother Nature returns the favor.

But near the rocks on the west side of the lake, whistling.

Near the rocks, where a stream careens into the lake, a whistling. We anchor the canoe and watch the rocks. No wind causes the whistling.

Between the rock and snowbank, brown faces peer out at us. Further up the scree, more brown faces peer. A whistle. The brown faces disappear. For a half hour, the rock chucks entertain us, exchanging whistles from their crannies in the rock, watching these two weird creatures bob on the surface of a frosty lake. When we paddle off, a dozen at least clamber to their perches, watching us depart. The wary watch, the others exchange glances, sniffs if they’re close enough. If we return, they dart into the rocks, watching from the shadows. We leave. They emerge. We return. They hide. But they always come out to watch as soon as we’ve turned our backs.

They’re camera-shy, of course. We can see them clearly enough through binoculars if we’re far enough away from their hideouts, but when we approach with the camera, they dart off. So we divide and conquer. My wife stays on the shore near the canoe as I climb up the rocks to the side of their colony. She makes a racket. They pop out to watch. I take their portraits.

They keep us busy the good part of a day. We don’t need any fireworks.

Tip: Meadow Lake is tucked in a secluded cirque in Idaho’s Lemhi mountain range, about 2 ½ hours north of Idaho Falls. Plan on snow if you arrive early in the season – and early appears to be anything before mid- to late July. The site is maintained by the U.S. Forest Service as an official campground, so plan on paying if you stay there. The lake is popular with fishermen and, as we discovered on a trip later in the year, moose.

Getting There: To get there from Idaho Falls, travel north on Interstate 15 to Sage Junction, where State Highway 33 crosses the interstate. Head west on the state highway, then turn northwest on Idaho Highway 28 just past the communities of Terreton and Mud Lake. About halfway between Mud Lake and Leadore, you’ll see a state historical marker labeled “Gilmore Townsite.” Turn off the highway to the west there and travel about five miles through thick forests, gently uphill, to the campsite. Winter is hard on the road, so take a rugged vehicle and be prepared to have a passenger move brush from the road when necessary. Finding brush and branches in the road is a good thing, because that means the campsite is likely not crowded.

Nearby: The gravel road will take you through Gilmore, a turn of the century mining town that went bust in the late 1920s (more on the town here: http://www.ghosttowns.com/states/id/gilmore.html). Many of the town’s original buildings still stand and are open to the curious, but be aware some of them are on private property and have been restored as vacation homes, so don’t wander indiscriminently.

What's upcoming at Uncharted.net is really exciting. Right now, we're just running our beta site. What we plan is a full-blown adventurers' community, where people can share photos, stories, video, exchange e-mails, make friends and do just about everything you'd want to do as you interact with people from around the globe. It's exciting. Each adventurer will have his or her own page, kind of a springboard into the world. They can explore the worlds others have created, and exchange ideas. It's the idea that though the world is discovered via Google Maps and folks like Vasco da Gama, it's fairly undiscovered by the rest of us. Here's our chance to discover.

So watch for updates to Uncharted.net to occur later this summer -- Our goal is to launch the new product before the leaves fall and the snow flies.

Mister Fweem on the Road

Greetings, readers, from the bustling city of Logan, Utah.

The blog is on the road this weekend, ostensibly to attend a meeting of the Grand Mystic Royal Order of the Noble Sons Ali Baba Temple of the Shrine, otherwise known as the annual Uncharted.net retreat. It's our second annual retreat, initiated at my behest because, frankly, I wanted another excuse to drop the kids off at their grandpa's house and allow myself and Michelle the luxury of wandinering off without them.

Still, we're plagued by reminders. While it is nice to be able to hear a child cry and realize that since it's not yours, you don't have to do anything about it, what's frustrating is that I keep clicking the button to open the sliding door on the van whenever we go back to it from the store or other such location. Habits die hard.

Our adventure for the day, aside from the three-hour trip here: Buying a copy of Adobe InDesign for the computer, which Michelle will use to continue updating her page design skills as she readies herself to make another Uncharted magazine. (If you haven't read the copy posted, conveniently, on this page, please do so. I think we've done a tremendous job.) I'll also continue to dabble as I try to improve my computer skills as I face, once again, the real possibility that I'll be cut loose from work as the company looks to print more money in September by cutting staff.

Speaking of staff, we've had some pretty interesting labor disputes at The Site this week. Friday, members of the United Steel Workers began picketing the Batelle Energy Alliance in Idaho Falls, as they have not reached agreement on their new labor contract. Earlier this week, members of the local carpenters' union walked off the job at the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit at INTEC, in support of a worker who was fired for cutting out the wrong portion of a wall. I know no one involved in any of the disputes, nor whether they're on the side of righteousness or not. But I do sympathize with them. Union workers are a rarity in Idaho, where Right to Work (a labor law which allows unions but also doesn't oblige people to join them -- a better explanation can be found here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work .

I'm not a union member as a technical writer. It's possible I could be. When I worked at Qwest, I joined the local for the Communication Workers of America, and it's possible they might entertain unionizing technical writers where I work. Would such an action be looked at kindly? I don't know. I'm sure that those I work with wouldn't be too keen on the idea, and I have to venture the opinion that the higher echelon wouldn't be too pleased, either. But I'm to the point where I'm getting a bit tired of the upper echelon, which keeps getting cycled through the place with a regularity that would please the constipated. Sounds like most of them are now off to Hanford, to make more money than they were making here, secure in their jobs as those of us who don't have the buddy connections stay here and worry about losing our jobs. I forget how much politics play out here. Yuck.

I'm now probably going to be regarded as a rabble-rouser, if any of this gets read. But it won't. No one reads this stuff, at least anyone who'd care to make trouble over it.

But back to Logan. I started to say our adventure was buying InDesign. We had to race down here to get to the bookstore (where I could get it at a massive discount, being a student at Utah State). We got to campus about five minutes before the bookstore was to close. Michelle raced in with my most recent receipt as I looked for a place to park the van. Michelle disappeared. I parked the van. I walked to the bookstore. I peered in through the locked doors, tucked my tail between my legs and walked off. Suddenly, someone opened the door and kindly let me in. Then I had to race through the store, get to the other part of the store where I again sat like a sad puppy until the lady who let me in got the attention of the others in the other store and let me in. I bought the program. Walked out of the store feeling quite happy with myself. Then ran into Michelle, who had succeeded in doing the exact same thing. So we had two copies of the software. We raced back into the store and luckily caught the poor cashier again, who processed a refund.

It was a comedy of errors, obviously. I have, somehow, a wounded, sad puppy dog look about me that makes people take pity on me. I'm aware of it and use it to my advantage often. In this case, bit bit us on the butt. But we got the software, got the refund, and now we're watching British sitcoms on TV. I'm signing off.

Noooooooooooooo!

Seems like we won't have Google Ron Paul to kick around any more.

The erstwhile limited government Republican/Internet geeks' 2008 answer to Howard Dean wiped the drive of his presidential campaign today, saying instead he will form an organization bent on finding and electing "limited government" politicians to public office. His new website is here: http://www.campaignforliberty.com/

True, he had no chance of winning the Republican nomination, once the John McCain Geriatric Juggernaut woke up and angrily asked who had snatched its newspaper. But now who am I going to vote for in November? I'll have to shoulder more of the blame for whoever gets in (or loses). I kinda know, now, how Hillary Clinton's supporters felt when she bailed on them a week ago.

This announcement, I'm sure, is causing much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth on the Intertubes. Paul's supporters, who pop up in the oddest of places, including in You Tube reviews of old Carol Burnett show skits, debates on the best brand of pantyhose and certainly anywhere the wearers of tinfoil hats gather, have got to be disillusioned. Well, probably not, considering who they were bucking for in the primaries, but still.

I suppose I could take the same approach I took at the primary election when confronted the the one (and only) candidate running for our local county prosecutor. I wrote in "Anyone else but him."

His departure also doesn't mean his supporters will take his campaign signs down. No chance. It's always fascinated me, the treatment campaign signs receive after the election is over. The winners almost invariably collect their signs, eager to preserve them for the general election, and perhaps elections to come if the weather wasn't too harsh on them. The losers, however, somehow always manage to leave their signs up forever, weathering in the sun, collecting trash at their stakes, flapping forlornly in the breeze, as forgotten as corn husks after the barbecue is over.

I think they're shaming us. Hoping, in some way, that the signs will be passed over at roadside trash collections, survive past the general election, perhaps a year or so into the winner's time in office. Then, as things turn sour and we, the voter, become embittered with those elected to public office. When we see their opponents' signs, standing defiantly among the waist-high weeds on the roadside, they hope we remember our vote and choke -- and then consider, maybe, voting for them at a future date. When they'll be victorious. And change everything. While their opponents leave their signs up, hoping they'll survive a year or two . . .

The Summer of 2000 and Froze to Death

For an explanation of the title to this post, see my post from April 3: http://misterfweem.blogspot.com/2008/04/is-it-spring-yet.html

Blame global warming if you must.

Blame the dearth in the sunspot cycle if you must.

Blame El Nino. La Nina. CFCs. Retreating glaciers. Advancing glaciers. Wi-Fi signals. People who try to pass off margarine as butter, thus fooling Mother Nature. People who wear tinfoil hats. People who don't wear tinfoil hats. Blame Thatcher. Blame whoever you want, but agree on this: Our summer, so far, stinks.

We've seen the 50 mil per hour winds. The weeks of rain. Yesterday, briefly, we saw snow. What we haven't seen, outside of a small number of days I can count on one hand since the calendar hit March 22 -- the official beginning of spring, harbinger of summer, time to take off the winter parkas, pack them away and time to jam the snow shovel into the deepest recesses of the tool shed -- is actual good weather.

The joke is that for 2008, we're glad summer came on a weekend.

The squash we planted in the garden are dead. Not that I'm disappointed. So are the cabbages (a bigger loss; I like my homemade sauerkraut). The carrots may survive if they ever come up, and the tomatoes are only holding on because of the Fort Knox-like shelter I built for them.

Our kids keep saying, we'll go to the spray park when summer comes. When summer comes, we'll go on vacation. When summer this, when summer that. When will summer come, our daughter asked a few nights ago, as thunder rolled and lightning flashed outside. I had to say I didn't know.

(Insert self-effacing paragraph on how blessed we are as Americans, particularly Americans who aren't being flooded, melted, tornadoed or otherwise more poorly treated by Mother Nature here, followed by obligatory repentance for everything American has whined about while ignoring problems in developing nations, Tibet, Iraq/Afghanistan, Sudan, et cetera, et cetera, until we all get bonked on the head and forget where we're going. But at least Saint Obama won the nomination.)

I think I feel better now. No warmer, but better.

Plutoids? Plutoids.

That wacky International Astronomical Union.

LIkely still smarting from criticism lobbed at them from every Joe-Six-Pack astronomer on the globe when they demoted Pluto to dwarf planet status two years ago, the IAU now wants to call any sufficiently round and massive object beyond the orbit of Neptune a "plutoid," rather than "dwarf planet."

Take it from a guy who's still very much a part of the My Very Educated Mother Just Gave Us Nine Pumpkins crowd: A plutoid may indeed be a plutoid. But Pluto is still Pluto.

I feel like those crazy ladies in Back to the Future: "Save the Clock Tower!"

Except I'm shouting

"Nine Pumpkins!"

I'd Like to Know . . .

I really hope, as I write this and as I imagine people reading this on my blog, that I’m not alone feeling this way and acting the way I do. Because if I am, I may find a very high bridge and chuck myself from the top of it.

Here’s the thesis statement. Or thesis whisper, perhaps:

I’m kind of dumb.

Not kind of dumb.

Just dumb.

Dumb in the fact that, two out of three times, I spelled dumb as “dubm,” and had to go back and re-type the word correctly.

Dumb in the fact that, on occasion, my brain will replay Brian Davidson’s Top 40 Dumbest Moments Ever, dredging up not only golden oldies from my childhood but flubs from my mission, schooling, aborted journalism career and last night, when I yelled my boys into bed.

Dave Barry says he believes such memory flashbacks are the likely cause of many suicides. A successful man, he said, could be happily barbecuing in his back yard when his brain sends forth a Review of Mistakes Past, and the next thing his family knows he’s stabbed himself in the head with the barbecue fork.

There are degrees of dumbness, to be sure. There are the instances when we look back on our dumbness with some humor and nostalgia, like the time I was playing in the garden with my brother and sister. We were digging in the dirt with sticks. My stick had dirt on the end, and I decided the dirt had to go. So I whapped it, very hard, across my bare thigh. Pain and a lifetime of recalled hilarity ensued. That’s not the kind of dumb I’m talking about here; the kind of dumb that brings a roll to your eyes and a smile to your face as you recall with fondness what an uneducated jerk you were.

I’m speaking here of a dumbness that leaves humor behind and enters the gloomy, lonely world of the genius of dumbness, like the months I spent at the paper so burned out by the job all I could do was pretty much nothing all day long. I only wrote stories to keep the suits in Idaho Falls off my back. Work was a burden. And I was the King of Idiots.

What’s worse is when dumbness spreads beyond the specific – a recollection of, say, the hour I spent with a borrowed companion wandering the aisles of a Carrefour just outside Toulouse, France, when I should have been out doing missionary work – to the general: A fear that the dumbness of instances like this is not isolated, that the dumbness is infused in my personality and pervades everything I do, from wearing my socks for more than two days in a row to wishing, just once, that when I got home from work nobody would be there so I could have the evening to myself. OR that dumbness makes you lazy. Or that laziness incites stupidity.

I worry it’s a moral responsibility to be clever, and that I’m failing in that responsibility. I’m working on a masters degree, you see, have been for over a year now. I don’t feel any smarter. Smarts, I know, doesn’t exactly come from book learning. It comes through age and experience and perseverance and all sorts of other adjectives and nouns with which I have only a passing acquaintance.

I feel like shouting “I am a moron!” to the world.

I fear getting the reply back, “We know that already.”

Do I keep trying, in my own stumblebum way, to do things? Yes, I do. That doesn’t make me feel any smarter, though.

Second Life, Real Life

The following is a paper I've written for one of my technical communication classes, on how a business (in this case, a Second Life furniture-making business) can use the real world (or as real as the Internet gets) in complement with their Second Life presence to organize documentation and ideas internally while advertising externally.

I am such a genius

Wile E. Coyote

Not Political

NOTE: Got tired of the politic slop. So here's some creative writing slop. Highly unfinished.

The animals of Purdy Farm knew something had to be done.

They gathered in the barn on a moonless night, cattle sweeping the stalls, the roosters herding their harems, the pigs grunting sleepily, the crows lining the rafters overhead.

Adora Belle, a Guernsy cow, was nervous of the crows. They didn’t belong to the farm particularly, they did no valuable work. But Littlebottom the cat and Janos the donkey convinced her they had as much a stake in what went on in the barn as any animal that worked at, burrowed under, flew over or snuffled through the farm. The crows had even managed to talk up the meeting enough in the woods and fallow prairies that a family of porcupines, three bright-eyed raccoons, a moth-eaten badger and a gaggle of field mice were in the barn, clustered close together, eyeing the others with awe and suspicion.

Across the barnyard, past the wagon-barn and the well, Farmer Purdy snored in his cot in the living room, close to the fire. His sleep was fitful. He woke often, to poke the fire, to sit up and cough a bone-rattling, hacking cough into an old spotted handkerchief. As he sat in the darkness, the room illuminated fitfully by the glow from the fire grate, he spotted the pile of paperwork on his cluttered desk. He coughed again, shivered, rolled into his blanket and turned back to the fire, his back to the desk.

“Is everyone here? Is anyone missing,” Adora Belle asked over the cackle of the crowd. The animals settled, a bit reluctantly. A mother mouse tried to shoosh her brood who’d started a game of hide-and-seek in the milking pails and butter churn.

“This is prob’ly all that’s comin,’ Belle,” Janos said. He looked around the barn. It was not as crowded as he would have liked. But so many had gone. The horses. Most of the cattle. All of the sheep. Only one of the sheep dogs remained, a depressed creature who slept in the hay loft and tried, once in a while, to halfheartedly herd the chickens. Someone had even taken the scarecrow Ma Purdy made years back, leaving the fields open to the crows that shuffled on the rafters, trying hard not to relieve themselves on the animals below.

Adora Belle cleared her throat. “We’d like to thank,”

“Kin we dispense with the speeches, miss, and get to th’ point o’ this meetin,” the badger asked. He stopped his own speech with a fit of coughing as the crows chuckled overhead.

“Easy, grandfather, don’t make this speech your last,” a crow shouted. The others laughed.

The badger stopped coughing. “Fine for you flightly young’uns to make fun of an old badger,” he said. “Freeloaders that you are, flyin’ in when the corn and raspberries is ripe, never doin’ nothin’ but eatin.’”

A crow dropped form the rafter, flew a tight corkscrew and landed with a thump on the ground in front of the badger’s snout. “Pretty preachy for a codger who hides in the woods all day, scared of his own shadow,” it said. “Don’t see you hitched to the plow!”

The badger snapped at the crow, making it hop backwards into a startled chicken. “I don’t work here, aye, but I don’t pilfer, either,” he said.

“Gentle friends, gentle friends,” Adora Belle lowed, stepping lightly over the chickens and ducks to the spot where the crow and badger eyed each other. “We don’t have time for fighting. We’re here,” she said, “to stop the Closure.”

All the animals in the barn heard the capital letter, the older ones explaining to the younger ones what they’d just heard. Closure. The word had been whispered, lowed, clucked, squeaked and grunted among animals living on and near the farm since Littlebottom first brought it to them two weeks ago. No one was really sure what it meant, but Littlebottom knew it meant the farmer had retired to his cot, growing more ill by the day. He rose only to stoke the fire, visit the outhouse and to stare forlornly at the papers piled on his desk.

“Aye, the Closure,” the badger shouted. “We wood folk have heard talk of the Closure from yon crows and mice,” he said. “None of us understand much what it means. I know closures when it comes ot tunnelin, but there be no tunnels o’ concern o’ the farmer on Purdy Farm. Ever sicne I closed that one the skunks had dug into the root cellar. Soft livin’ they was lookin’ for, yes, not knowin’ that in my time I seen soft livin’ bring the poison, the traps, the shotgun, I have.”

“Is that what happened to your face, grandfather,” the young crow laughed.

“Nay,” the badger said. “Lost me eye and me ear in a scrap, I did. Just as you’re about to. And if I can’t find yon ear, I’ll go fer the brain! An’ I doubt I can find that.”

“Get him, Chylus, get the ratbag!” the crows in the rafters shouted. A few flew off, circling over the badger and crow, hoping for a better view of the fight. The chickens cackled and ran, crashing into each other and the other animals as they tried to find places to hide. The filed mice lined up on the lip of a pail, leaning forward expectantly. The porcupines stepped nervously from one foot to another, not wanting to witness a fight but unwilling to flee, lest they put an eye out with one of their quills.

“Silence,” Janos whispered. “Silence.”

The donkey joked often to Adora Belle that he wasn’t a donkey at all. Wheezing in his raspy voice, he said, “I’m all hoarse.” But over any din, be it cackling chickens, a gale ripping shakes off the barn roof, the roar of a tractor, all the other animals could hear Janos’ whispers. They quieted. The crows flying overhead made a few more passes, then flew back to their roosts in the rafters. Chylus, eyeing the badger suspiciously, hopped back, turned and flew to a rail on one of the stalls. The badger stared evilly up at him.

Adora Belle spoke. “We haven’t time to fight amongst ourselves,” she said. “Littlebottom will tell us why we’re here. Littlebottom!”

The cat looked up from his perch on a pile of gunny sacks. HE stood up, stretched, then leisurely walked to the center of the crowd of animals, tail erect, walking daintily as if on the carpet in the Purdy farmhouse hallway.

“Someone needs to put a quill up that cat’s bottom,” one of the porcupines said. The field mice nearby twittered. They did not trust Littlebottom one bit. They’d lost too many relatives to be friendly with any feline.

Littlebottom glanced at the mice and licked his lips. Then he turned, jumped onto a bale of straw near where Adora Belle stood, turned a few times, then settled on his bottom, his back to the mice and wood folk, addressing the farm animals. “Two weeks ago, while perusing the farm mail, Farmer Purdy stumbled across an envelope which, upon opening brought him distinct physical, and as you all know, mental anguish as well,” Littlebottom said. “This was not, I knew immediately, the same kind of physical duress that overtakes Farmer Purdy when he reads his bills, his bank statements nor even the letters from his sister Patricia, who lives in a townhouse in the city and fills her letters with her absolutely horrid memories of growing up on the farm, questioning him in every letter why he insists on hanging about with filthy pigs and ducks and why don’t you just sell the farm and bring Littlebottom and live with me, well, not with me, but nearby, perhaps on the other side of town where the rent is cheaper and more fitting to a man of your social proclivities. Those letters almost always put him in a rage, and whether it’s cold or not, dinner time or not, he always stuffs them in the stove and scratches around for the matches.”

“Get to the point, please, Cat. We haven’t got all night,” the porcupine father said.

Littlebottom gave the porcupine a sour look, over his shoulder. “I was just getting to the Closure,” he said. “There are four of them, or so he read from the letter two weeks ago. Four Closures. They’re coming from the bank, because the letter came out of the same kind of envelope he gets his bank statements in, except this one had a lot of red lettering on the front that I couldn’t quite make out.”

“Probly cause Purdy didn’t read it,” Chylus said. “That cat’s no reader.”

“What’s a bank, now,” the badger asked. “Never get nothin’ from the banks I know, down at the stream.”

“A bank,” Littlebottom said, not turning to face the badger, “is, well, sort of like a church, I believe. I’ve never been to one. But when Farmer Purdy gets his letters and there’s one from the bank in the pile, he always says something like, ‘It’s from the bank. Lord, what do they want now?’ He always talks about not having enough in the bank. It’s probably because he doesn’t go there that often. Ma Purdy used to take him to church every Sunday. I think they went to the bank on occasion, too, but since she passed, God bless her, he’s been to neither.”

“Ma Purdy was a right beast,” one of the crows said. “Threw apples at us. Put out the scarecrow.” The murder of crows, as a whole, shuddered. They hated the scarecrow, rejoicing the day it was blown away during a thunderstorm.

“What do we care that a Closure’s coming, four of ‘em or not,” one of the pigs grunted. “Maybe better pickings once they come. Slop’s been a bit thin, lately.