The Mental Deterioration Continues

We have church at noon. We have had church at noon for more than eleven months now.

Yet this week I have twice told random children and my wife that we have church at 10:30 am and, in the case of this morning, that we needed to get on the dime if we were going to be there on time.

I blame it on an undercaffienated system. Or maybe it's just that I'm a doddering old fool. But I'm going to stick with the caffiene thing.

A Weird Little Memory: Not Seeing Candleshoe

Flashback to sometime in the summer of 1977. I would have been about five years or so old. Standing in line at the Mann Theater in Idaho Falls, waiting to get in to see a movie.

I imagine I had older brothers or sisters with me. I don't remember a lot about it. I do remember a theater employee poking his head out of the building -- the line was out the door -- to say that the movie we were there to see, Candleshoe, was sold out.

Maybe we went home. Maybe we did something else. I don't remember. I just remember them shouting that the movie was sold out and we left the line. I probably didn't even know what movie we were there to see.

I have no recollection of the film at all, so I'm sure either we didn't go back to the theater to see it, or it was so unmemorable my young mind just blanked out on it. It's just weird that I have that "movie's sold out" memory stuck in my head.

For a while, I thought the movie I'd been denied a screening of was Sixteen Candles, but as that came out in 1984, that makes a lot less sense. Candleshoe it is.

Also, I know I've never seen Sixteen Candles.

I'm watching a few scenes now just to see if they trigger any memories. I thought for a second the "train chase" was going to connect to a game I used to play in the sandbox, with an old-fashioned car crashing into a ditch over and over. But nothing.

Nothing at all. I don't think I ever saw this movie. But I know we were in line once when it was sold out.

Don't Ask Me to Explain This

Last night I dreamed Eurythmics-era Annie Lennox, a ticket agent at a French train station, was trying her hardest to smuggle me and my family out of occupied France but I was having trouble following her instructions until my wife intervened, and in perfect French, sorted the mess and told me what I had to write on my luggage to get everything through.

It could possibly have been David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust; it's probably impossible to tell which.

Given this was the soundtrack to the dream, though, I'm betting it was Lennox:

Where Are You, Appliance/Absinthe Chicago Lonely Boy?

Twenty years or so ago, in one of my explorations of Internet rabbit holes, I stumbled across a personal blog written by a young man living and working in the Chicago area.

He lived, I thought, a rather empty and lonely life -- but also one in which he appeared to have a lot of disposable income. Almost every post was about his purchase of a new bit of consumer appliancery, from humidifiers to lamps to coffeemakers. The posts not about appliances were about long drives he took in cars he rented as he figured out what kind of car he wanted to buy for himself.

One New Years' Eve, he celebrated with absinthe in a post in which he basked in utter civility.

I've long since lost track of the blog, and wonder if I found it now if he'd still be writing, either about new appliances or new rental cars or absinthe or all of these in context of a family or perhaps he's just an older version of the lonely young man who wrote those messages long ago.

That's the kind of thing you think about when your brain remembers them, is what I'm getting at.

Open

Open.

Opposite of closed.

So that things, people, air, can go in and out or be put in and out.

Not taken or filled.

Accessible, as to appeals, ideas, or offers.

Open a business.

An open city.

The bedrooms open into the hall.

To be open to suggestion.

Ralphie always has his mouth open with random sounds coming out.

From the Middle English and Old English opan, the German offen.

Abierto, not cerrado.



I’m not sure it’s helping. But I typed the word “open” so many times today, it lost all meaning. Help me out here. Bring me back into the land of the linguistically grounded.

Conversation With A Mule

Comedians today would listen to a monologue such as this and not give it a second thought. Audiences hearing a monologue such as this today might sit quietly for a minute or two, but quickly get bored and maybe even boo.

With the passing of Andy Griffith today at age 86, we’ve lost yet another link to the past.

I don’t remember much of Mr. Griffith’s TV work. I’m just a bit too young for the Andy Griffith Show, though I do remember somehow watching an occasional rerun, probably on Saturday afternoons when the three networks knew nobody was watching and could put up any fool thing hoping to attract even the smallest audience. I’m just a bit too young as well for the Matlock crowd, though I do remember a time or two passing the show as I was once again clicking futilely through the four channels we got on TV to find something to watch. I probably turned the thing off and went outside. Again.

But would I, today, in thinking of this conversation with a mule, change places with those who knew Mr. Griffith at his radio, his vinyl album prime?

You know for an ever-lovin’ fact that I wouldn’t.

But thanks to the squirrelers of memory, I can sit back a bit and listen to his old comedy bits and think of living in a time when this was all there was on the radio – when radio was much more than just squawky love songs. Radio was the internet of the day, with its infinite crackly stations filled with the oddities of humanity, flavored locally.

YouTube is kinda my radio these days, and there’s a lot more to be found out there than on those scratchy AM stations. And once in a while I sail into these old radio comics like Griffith and think, maybe I would trade places with that mule. At least for a little while.

Facebook is Turning Into my Brain

Hit upon something profound (maybe) and a little disturbing (definitely) today while I was farting around on the computer:

Facebook is turning into my brain.

Example: A few days ago, I heard Edvard Greig's "Dance of the Dwarves" on the radio. I dig Greig and, frankly, recall hearing this music used in some kind of cartoon I watched as a kid. So I wanted to remember this piece. So rather than hammering the memory I have of the tune (at least the opening and closing; I have no memories of the bridge) with the names of Greig and the Dance of the Dwarves, I turned first to YouTube and then to Facebook, because I knew going back to YouTube with a search for "that piece I was listening to and dancing to on the radio while doing dishes when my daughter came into the room and was embarrassed by my white man dancing" wasn't going to pull up anything on YouTube. (Well, it came up with this, but it's not quite exactly what I was hoping for.)

Nicholas Carr, of course, would be appalled. Carr is of course the author of the infamous "Is Google Making Us Stupid," in which he said this:

Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”

Such an ambition is a natural one, even an admirable one, for a pair of math whizzes with vast quantities of cash at their disposal and a small army of computer scientists in their employ. A fundamentally scientific enterprise, Google is motivated by a desire to use technology, in Eric Schmidt’s words, “to solve problems that have never been solved before,” and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem out there. Why wouldn’t Brin and Page want to be the ones to crack it?

Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

I'm not as much as a worrywart as Carr is (something he admits, though he never met me personally). I may used Facebook and such to supplement my memory, but it's hardly replacing it. And I'm making new connections to new stuff thanks to the Internet all the time. In fact, if it weren't for this blog entry, I'd never have switched my doing-dishes song from Dance of the Dwarves to "Washing Dishes With My Sweetie."

Unloading the Brain Pan

Just a smattering of little stuff needing to go somewhere:

• My mother likely had a heart attack -- a mild one -- last Thrusday. She's still in the hospital undergoing some tests. Her spirits seem good, though she's fairly weak as she battles not only the heart trouble but also an infection and kidneys functioning less than normally. Not fun.
• It may look like we're seeking buried treasure or looking for Walter, but we are in fact digging up small portions of the back yard so we can find the sprinkler system this house was supposed to come with. So far, we've discovered a stuck petcock valve that's supposed to turn the whole system on, plus one buried sprinkler head that matches the sprinkler head in the front yard that Intermountain Gas dug up, dumped, and didn't tell us about, leavint it for us to discover. Yeah, I'll grouse a little, but at least we're finding things. The sprinkler head in the back yard was buried about two inches deep, leading me to believe the system hasn't been working for some time. The stuck valve and the PVC pipe masquerading as the supply line lead me to believe we'll be doing a lot of digging before this system is completely functional. Not looking forward to that. But at least I got to buy a pick for the work, so that's something. A new tool is always a good thing. I'm also lucky to have a brother who has done this kind of work before, guiding me along.
• I don't understand some of my students. If you don't get what you're supposed to be doing for an assignment, does it make sense to wait until the night before it's due to start asking questions? Not to me it doesn't. But I do my best to answer these questions -- on a weekend when they'd been warned the network would be undergoing some maintenance, so I answered the question the day after the assignment was due. We'll see what happens there. Teaching at BYU-Idaho is an interesting thing. They make you feel very guilty if you're not in constant, individual contact with your students. But I'm an instructor, not a baby-sitter. I know it's best -- part of the good, better, best we get pounded with -- to dig into why our students aren't on track for getting their homework done, but the truth is getting email reminders won't cut the mustard and getting a call from an instructor could be interpreted as passive aggressive or downright creepy. It's their job to keep up with their schoolwork, not mine. They are adults, after all.
• I still think if I ever get to teach a class on creative writing, one of the things I'm going to have my students do is to write the novelization of at least a portion of their favorite movie. I think it would be a good exercise in helping them to write vividly and to translate cinematic/visual elements ot their writing to liven things up and to make them feel more real. I say this as I read the novelization to "Young Frankenstein," by an author who certainly could have benefitted from such a class. I include myself in the 'could benefit' category myself, which is why I think this is such a spaking idea.

Thinking Critically about Critical Thinking

This is the kind of book that those smarty-pants YouTube commenters read, absorb and then regurgitate without grasping the concept that it’s supposed to make you a better critical thinker, not a wise-ass.

Nevertheless, I wish more people would read and internalize what M. Neil Browne and Stuart M. Keeley advocate in “Asking the Right Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking,” – most especially their “Final Word” at the end of the book:

As a parting shot, we want to encourage you to engage with issues. Critical thinking is not a sterile hobby, reserved only for classrooms, for taking exams, or for showing off your mental cleverness. It provides a basis for a partnership for action among the reasonable. Beliefs are wonderful, but their payoff is in our subsequent behavior. After you have found the best answer to a question, act on that answer. Make your critical thinking the basis for the creation of an identity of which you can be proud. Put it to work for yourself and for the community in which you find yourself.

Remember, the payoff of becoming a better critical thinker is in our subsequent behavior. I kinda like the sound of that. Reminds me of something CS Lewis once wrote:

As the author of the Theologia Germanica says, we may come to love knowledge -- our
knowing -- more than the thing known: to delight not in the exercise of our talents but in the fact that they are ours, or even in the reputation they bring us. Every success in the scholar's life increases this danger. If it becomes irresistible, he must give up his scholarly work. The time for plucking out the right eye has arrived.

Unfortunately, critical thinking takes time. And in our time-obsessed culture, we just don’t have the patience for it. Even when our sitting president (whom I voted for) urges the press corps just to report what he or his administration says without bothering to look “at the other side” because the other side is stupid or out of touch or dead wrong or whatever reason, I see clearly that something is dead wrong with our obsession with time. My goals: Read this book again several times over, learn how to become a critical thinker, and then s-l-o-w d-o-w-n. Or at least replace any quick wise-assery with nonsequiturs, which aren’t all that helpful to the conversation but at least get out that urge to participate without thinking in a more harmless fashion.

All joking aside, this book is a wonderful guide for anyone (student, journalist, blogger, YouTube commenter) who wants to move beyond the quick to really get the tools to become a better, more critical thinker. I’m hoping that there are a few good thinkers among the Obama press corps who listened to what he said and said, “Wait, whut?” and then went on doing their own critical thinking, occasionally dismissing the “other side” because, yes, they are full of hooey, but occasionally reminding himself or herself that the world is rarely black and white, that there are almost always more than two alternatives and that even sitting presidents of the United States can fall victim to any of the common logical fallacies Browne and Keeley outline in their book, or, at worst, one of the classic blunders Vizzini talks about:

Funny I should bring Vizzini up: Browne and Keeley talk a lot about looking at our own values, assessing their own strengths and weaknesses and how we can better use what we believe (or adjust what we believe) as we embark on the critical thinking path. Vizzini obviously believed that the Man in Black would rely on his great physical strength to overcome the poison and thus thought his intellect was superior – not knowing that the Man in the Black had gamed the system by using his brains to augment his physical strength by building up an immunity to iocane powder.

Same values differential going on here, between Satchel the dog and Bucky the cat:

Satchel is obviously more interested in getting Rob a gift he knows he wants, while Bucky, blinded by his own values and selfishness, can’t see how Satchel’s beliefs are worth a hill of beans. A good critical thinker Bucky is not. (Satchel isn’t all that smart, either, but he obviously believes in friendship through buying a wanted gift much more than Bucky does.)

Why am I reading this book? In a few weeks, I’ll be teaching a class that centers on it, so I’d better know it inside and out. And I want to become a better teacher by way of helping my students think more critically, so I’ve got to do some learning myself.

Mysterious Nyuks

I think I’m going nuts. Or I really did just hear the first eights of the "nyuk nyuk nyuk nyuk" The Three Stooges are wont to make. Why would someone in the trailer issue such an abortive nyuk? Why are my ears so attuned that I can hear an eighth of a nyuk⁴ at a hundred paces? Yes, I have some Three Stooges DVDs at home, but I can’t remember the last time I watched one of them. And I didn’t watch a lot of them as a kid, either. Oh, a few, but not enough that you think my brain would have a nyuk on an E-Z recall memory circuit linked acutely to my peripheral hearing. Maybe it was just a weird noise, and my brain, seeking to classify that weird noise, went through my Inner Box of Weirdness and came up with a nyuk as a possible explanation.

Feeling Stupid? Go With That Feeling

There's an interesting article at Salon.com by Glenn Greenwald that focuses a bit on the Jon Steward/Jim Cramer kerfuffle that makes for good reading for anyone concerned with how we get our news these days.

Reporter Cramer basically uses the "I was lied to" defense in answering why he continued to tout companies and investments that later imploded during the opening moments of our current financial crisis in 2008. Now, as a reporter, I've fallen back on that defense myself -- and it seems completely justified, until you hear comedian Jon Stewart's response:

But what is the responsibility of the people who cover Wall Street? I'm under the assumption, and maybe this is purely ridiculous, but I'm under the assumption that you don't just take their word at face value. That you actually then go around and try to figure it out.

Ouch. Yeah, Stewart was basically asking Cramer why he wasn't doing his job as a journalist. The old newsroom saw goes "If your mother says she loves you, check it out." In other words, you can't take what your sources say at face value because, more often than not, they've forgotton something, they've unmaliciously exaggerated, they're flat out wrong or, in ways that range from innocent to devious, they've lied to you. I fell into that trap several times as a newspaper reporter, and it always stung. What stung more is that there were ample opportunities to discover that what I was being told was not the truth, but I did not take those opportunities because, well, I was lazy.

Greenwald comes down pretty hard on the established media for this mindset -- and does so justifiably:

That's the heart of the (completely justifiable) attack on Cramer and CNBC by Stewart. They would continuously put scheming CEOs on their shows, conduct completely uncritical "interviews" and allow them to spout wholesale falsehoods. And now that they're being called upon to explain why they did this, their excuse is: Well, we were lied to. What could we have done? And the obvious answer, which Stewart repeatedly expressed, is that people who claim to be "reporters" are obligated not only to provide a forum for powerful people to make claims, but also to then investigate those claims and then to inform the public if the claims are true. That's about as basic as it gets.

Today, everyone -- including media stars everywhere -- is going to take Stewart's side and all join in the easy mockery of Cramer and CNBC, as though what Stewart is saying is so self-evidently true and what Cramer/CNBC did is so self-evidently wrong. But there's absolutely nothing about Cramer that is unique when it comes to our press corps. The behavior that Jon Stewart so expertly dissected last night is exactly what our press corps in general does -- and, when compelled to do so, they say so and are proud of it.

I'm not sure there are any reporters who are immune to taking this defense, and who are sheepishly proud of their efforts once they make the effort, rather than go through the motions. There are many out there who do exactly what Stewart advises Cramer to do, and the industry is duly proud of them. But more often than not, going through the motions is what meets the deadlines and is what makes the job the easiest. I'm working as hard as I can to recognize that kind of behavior in the tasks I take on now, in a different field of communications. Part of that recognition includes finding ways to erradicate that behavior. Taking that kind of defense doesnt' make you look like a victim of circumstance, it makes you look stupid. And as my brother says when I mention I'm feeling stupid: "Go with that feeling."

But it's interesting to hear a comedian like Stewart say it. Nobody, as Greenwald says, will pay attention to the advice, beyond snickering that it was Cramer who got fed that crow sandwich on national television. I'd like to think that Cramer learns a lesson from this encounter, and that others in the business take heed of it as well. I know I'll look at ways to do it in my own job as well.

To Mars

This thought struck me today, as I sat in my gray little cubicle in the dumpy little trailer way out in the middle of the Lost River Desert, buried in snow and hoping for a glimpse through the copier room window of the rabbits that live underneath our trailer:

I want to go to Mars.

I've been to Mars, of course, thanks to Ray Bradbury and a little thing he calls R is for Rocket. First read the book years ago and was most struck by "The Rocket," a story Bradbury wrote of another man's longing to walk on the surface of the Red Planet. Unable to afford tickets to Mars, (mankind first landed on the planet 70 years before) he builds is own rocket ship from a mockup rocket and takes his children on a trip:

"Listen, keep your ears clean [says the father, Fiorello Bodoni]. Smell the smells of a rocket. Feel. Remember. So when you return you will talk of it all the rest of your lives."

"Yes, Papa."

The ship was quiet as a stopped clock. The airlock hissed shut behind them. He strapped them all, like tiny mummies, into rubber hammocks. 'Ready?" he called.

"Ready!" all replied.

"Blast-off!" He jerked ten switches. The rocket thundered and leaped. The children danced in their hammocks, screaming. "We're moving! We're off! Look!"

"Here comes the Moon!"

The Moon dreamed by. Meteors broke into fireworks. Time flowed away in a serpentine of gas. The children shouted. Released from their hammocks, hours later, they peered from the ports. "There's Earth!" "There's Mars!"

The rocket dropped pink petals of fire while the hour dials spun; the child eyes dropped shut. At last they hung like drunken moths in their cocoon hammocks.

"Good," whispered Bodoni, alone.

He tiptoed from the control room to stand for a long moment, fearful, at the airlock door.

He pressed a button. The airlock door swung wide. He stepped out. Into space? Into inky tides of meteor and gaseous torch? Into swift mileages and infinite dimensions?

No. Bodoni smiled.

All about the quivering rocket lay the junkyard.

Rusting, unchanged, there stood the padlocked junkyard gate, the little silent house by the river, the kitchen window lighted, and the river going down to the same sea. And in the center of the junkyard, manufacturing a magic cream, lay the quivering, purring rocket. Shaking and roaring, bouncing the netted children like flies in a web.

Maria stood in the kitchen window.

He waved to her and smiled.

He could not see if she waved or not. A small wave, perhaps. A small smile.

The sun was rising.

Bodoni withdrew hastily into the rocket. Silence. All still slept. He breathed easily. Tying himself into a hammock, he closed his eyes. To himself he prayed, Oh, let nothing happen to the illusion of the next six days. Let all of space come and go, and red Mars some up under our ship, and the moons of Mars, and let there be no flaws in the color film. Let there be three dimensions; let nothing go wrong with the hidden mirrors and screens that mold the fine illusion. Let time pass without crisis.

He awoke.

Red Mars floated near the rocket.

"Papa!" The children thrashed to be free.

Bodoni looked and saw red Mars and it was good and there was no flaw in it and he was very happy.

At sunset on the seventh day the rocket stopped shuddering.

"We are home," said Bodoni.

They walked across the junkyard from the open door of the rocket, their blood singing, their faces glowing. Perhaps they knew what he had done. Perhaps they guessed his wonderful magic trick. But if they knew, fi they guessed, they never said. Now they only laughed and ran.

"I have ham and eggs for all of you," said Maria, at the kitchen door.

"Mama, Mama, you should have come, to see it, to see Mars, Mama, and meteors, and everything!"

"Yes," she said.

At bedtime, the children gathered before Bodoni. "We want to thank you, Papa."

"It was nothing."

"We will remember it for always, papa. We will never forget."

Very late in the night Bodoni opened his eyes. He sensed that his wife was lying beside him, watching him. She did not move for a very long time, and then suddenly she kissed his cheeks and his forehead. "What's this?" he cried.

"You're the best father in the world," she whispered.

"Why?"

"Now I see," she said. "Now I understand."

She lay back and closed her eyes, holding his hand. "Is it a very lovely journey?" she asked.

"Yes," he said.

"Perhaps," she said, "perhaps, some night, you might take me on just a little trip, do you think?"

"Just a little one, perhaps," he said.

"Thank you," she said. "Good night."

"Good night," said Fiorello Bodoni.

Yes, a sham. But not a sham. The family of Fiorello Bodoni believed they flew to Mars. Thus, they flew to Mars.

I want to go to Mars. I want to walk on the surface of that distant red planet, crawl down into the bowl of a crater, pick up handfuls of Martian sand. The dream is not dead. The technology is not outside our grasp. There are those who wonder why bother sending a man to Mars, when robots can go and be safer, less expensive. I say, the Bodoni children went to Mars. I want to go, too.

Where can I take my children, how can I take them on trips they will never forget? They're growing up so quickly. I haven't taken them to Mars yet. We need to go. It's not too late. I need to build a rocket ship. And I need to take my wife, too.

Foolhardiness

A few minutes ago, I came in from shoveling snow, digging the woodpile out from under about six inches of snow, filling the woodbox and generally getting things ready to keep the family warm tomorrow. I was outside for about twenty minutes in twelve-degree weather. I was clad in a sweatshirt, sweat shorts, a pair of cotton socks and a pair of clogs. No coat. No gloves. And those clogs do nothing to keep the snow out. So my feet, after ten minutes of being back inside the house (along with the rest of my body, natch) are finally warming up.

I think it's genetic. Many years ago, one of my older sisters locked her keys in her car. She called Dad, who was at home, sick with the flu, to bail her out. He went to the rescue, clad in one of Mom's coats and a pair of wooden shoes. Of course his car runs out of gas when he's almost to my sister. She sees him walking past hooting traffic, clad as he was, her knight coming to the rescue.

So, you see, it's not really my fault. I got those genes from Dad.

Posted with LifeCast

Firm, Yet Subtle

Firm, yet subtle.

Blogger's Note: Yes, more from publications management. This time, discussion on two chapters in Cathy Connor Lips' book "Effective Publications Management," on communications auditiing and creating clear concepts. Useful stuff, even if (as you'll see) it's not necessarily followed in this book.

The advice in these chapters falls at a good time, as Uncharted is performing a mini-audit combined with a brainstorming session as we try to shape a portion of our online publication in regards to how the audience uses and interacts with it now, versus how we’d like to shape that use and interactivity in the future.

First, a brief explanation of what Uncharted is – we’re an online community of adventurers sharing stories and photos of trips and vacations we’ve taken. Right now, we have stories and photos sets on trips ranging from a cruise to Alaska to a quiet sojourn down the San Juan River in Utah. We have staff members who write and take photos and an online community where anyone can share their work as well.

For the past month and a half, we’ve featured only staff content on our home page, but this next week will be the first time we’ll feature a story and photo set completed by one of our community members. We’re figuring out how to present this visually and textually to convey the following messages to our audience:

1) This is a contribution from a non-staff member! Hurrah!
2) This is what an “explorer” is – a chance to explain our company jargon. (An explorer is a non-staff member of the Uncharted community whose work is featured on the home page.)
3) This is what we look for in “explorer” contributions.

We have to be, in the words of Ralphie Parker, “firm but subtle.” We don’t necessarily want to broadcast in bold and flashing lights that this is what’s happening, because it’ll interrupt the visual continuity we’re trying to achieve. Yet if we take other approaches – using the company blog, for example, to explain the significance of what’s going on, we risk that message being missed by our primary audience that bypasses the blog and goes straight into the home pages and misses the significance of our latest update.

That brings us into the brainstorming bit, which is what we’re doing now. We started an e-mail chain on this last night, and hopefully by the end of the day we’ll have a workable solution. As Lips recommends, we’re now just tossing out ideas, not dismissing any at the moment and not looking at past performance because what we’re doing now is, for our product, an absolutely new thing: Differentiating between staff and non-staff content featured on the home page. We want this event noted with adequate fanfare to get other community members excited, and to reintroduce the idea that they can nominate stuff on the site to be featured on the home page.

We also plan to use this opportunity for some user testing – avoiding banking on the success of a single concept, as Lips warns in Chapter Three. If we try one way and it doesn’t get the reaction we hope for, we’ll try another way, and test that as well. On one of our iterations we’re likely to find something that resonates with our contributors and gets them excited about contributing stories and photos on the hopes they’ll be featured on the home page as well. (That, and we’ve got to get our story submission module working again. It’s having difficulties at the moment.)

This brings us into an aside that again focuses on the mini-audit. Even though we don’t have a clear method for Uncharted members to nominate a story to be featured (that was part of a passel of things that got trimmed from the site design as we worked through several design iterations, focusing on getting core elements working at a cost we could afford) some have figured out ways to make such nominations, either by e-mailing staff members they know, or by leaving comments on the stories/photos themselves. They’ve shown their ingenuity. We need, however, to be more upfront and clear with the nomination process, so it’s a one-button arrangement. This will tie in, I hope, with the messaging we plan to produce to promote the first non-staff submission to be featured on the home page. In other words, we have a chance here to help shape our audience’s habits, tying in with what Beth Swanson of Wendy’s magazine fame says in Chapter Three: we have to “be specific about what actions [the audience] needs to take, and why.”

Belief Index

As I was looking up a word in the dictionary, I had a crazy thought strike: Why not set up something called the Belief Index, where people of multiple opposing views can agree to adopt (or at least agree to appear to adopt) beliefs that others hold, in order to create a false sense of harmony on the Internet? Well, aside from the fact that such a false sense is already doing very well on the Internet without my little idea, thank you very much.

It’s still entertaining to envision. It could go something like this:
User1: I offer a belief that the earth is less than 7,000 years old for a pretended belief that gay marriage is acceptable. Any takers?

User2: That’s a tall order. I’m still trying to find someone willing to swap belief in evolution for a pretended belief that the only real Kennedy Legacy is the Apollo program, the Peace Corps, and the half-dollar.

User1: Duuuude.

(Yes, submitters would have to be up front if they truly intended to believe their newly-swapped belief, or merely plan to pretend such belief on the cynical notion that most everyone practices belief and tolerance of belief for the things they already believe in. Which, of course, doesn’t happen in our day. Don’t know why I brought it up.)

Maybe this could be a subculture on Twitter, or some other similar useless Internet venture, where the illusion of informed thought and discussion of the issues of today is really a sign that U.S. productivity declines are not due to outsourcing, the souring economy and other such malarkey but due to hours frittered away on useless pursuits.

What’s worse is I forgot what word I was looking up in the dictionary when these thoughts trampled through my brain like a herd of constipated wiener dogs. And I won’t fall into the cranial trap of looking through the dictionary again.

A Ponderin'

Funny thing, how ideas come around and go around.

Back in the day (early to late 1940s, I believe) British author C.S. Lewis took his collection of books and papers -- which amounted to quite a pile -- to the library at Cambridge, figuring that if he wanted to read a book, he could go to the library and borrow it. Having the stuff stored and cared for at the library meant he didn't have to do any of it himself. The information was at a place where he could go practically any time he wanted.

So today we have the Internet. Right now I'm watching an episode of "Last of the Summer Wine" on YouTube, without having to buy it. Seems odd. What C.S. Lewis did as a benefit to others, what I'm doing now is a detriment -- taking money from someone else. I am scum.

Speaking of Curiosity . . .

There are, of course, things your parents never tell yo as a child, and if you happen to be among the youngest in a large family or the youngest in a small family, there are things that are whispered to spelled out in front of you even if you're thirty-seven years old. I would not be surprised to this day if it were revealed that my father wore explosive socks.

A Curious Argle-Bargle

Blogger's Note: More flotsam from my publications management class. We were asked to read and discuss the introduction and first chapter of Effective Publications Management, by Cathy Connor Lips. To my credit, I managed to post something that was sensible and did not, in any way, make fun of the author's name. But because I cannot contain it any longer, This Blog presents the following:

What, exactly, are connor lips?

Thank you for bearing with me. Now, on to the discussion:

It’s no surprise to me that the major points of this weeks’ reading assignment are points of doctrine that have been pounded into me since I decided I wanted to be a writer more than two (nearly three, yikes) decades ago:

Learn to multitask
Remain curious
Show up prepared

What writers today are being asked to do, be curious about and be prepared about has certainly changed in the past 29 years, but the driving philosophies remain strong.

As Prof. Hailey has mentioned earlier, back in the day it was a multitasking writer who could cut-and-paste, learning with waxed paper, tape and x-acto knives the art of paste-up. Nowadays, we’ve gone beyond that into desktop publication design, web design, HTML and XML. To those of you working with XML and such on a regular basis, I’m jealous. I’m pleased as punch to be getting my feet wet when it comes to website design and management, but I’d like to be doing more – and what I’m doing now comes through a volunteer gig (http://www.uncharted.net/, please oh please check us out) than at work, where Word is Master.

Writers who remain curious rank among the best writes out there. An avid curiosity also shows our customers we’re willing to understand the problem/question from their point of view, making us a more valuable asset to them in the future. (Ironically, for me, remaining curious is the thing I have to remind myself to do. I actually have a sticky note on my monitor at work that reads “Be Curious,” though it seems to have disappeared this week. Probably stuck to some papers somewhere. I’ll have to make a new one. Some people like to say there’s such a thing as being too curious (as the attached picture entails). I don’t believe that much. Being curious for about thirty seconds last week would have saved me three angst-filled days this weekend, so, trust me, being curious DOES NOT come naturally to all human beings.

And nobody, absolutely nobody, likes it when the agenda gets to the point where the unprepared person is set to speak about his or her unpreparedness. Time-waster. I like to waste time on my own terms, thank you very much. I have a boss whose pet peeve is people who show up unprepared. If you’re unprepared, he says, it shows you don’t care about what you’re doing, that you think what you’re doing is unimportant or that you’d rather be on the unemployment line, he is fond of saying when I paraphrase him.

Now, an aside. Our professor's introductory note to this topic included the following paranthetical phrase:

"Take that Mrs. Thistlebottom! (She was my old English teacher who used to gig me for run-on sentences)."

I have to wonder if, when she entered college, if she knew she was destined to become an English teacher. You don't find any math or phys ed instructors with a name like Thistlebottom.

I'm Going to Do It

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Remember the moral: Never squish pinecones and pineapples together, especially if you're old old old.

Like me.

Parody Time

Any good journalist, of course, knows that writing to one's audience is the best way to connect and make readers care about what you're writing. And then there are the writers who try to connect to the New York Times audience, where you get stories like this: As the Rich Get Poorer, Teenagers Feel the Crunch.

The kind folks at Slate.com asked readers to submit a parody. Here is mine:

When Angela Frump started her junior year of high school in Scoville, Idaho, this fall, she cut a path at her school with her clothing, shoes and easy way with her spending money.

But in October he father lost his job as foreman at a huge hog rendering plant at Atomic City, then landed one close to home as an itinerant babbler who gesticulates at traffic while waving a “Will Work for Pilates” sign at busy street corners. Angela now steals clothing from the bin behind the Salvation Army Thrift Store rather than wait until the store opens in order to do her shopping. She no longer has used wax paper to stuff in the holes in her shoes and makes due with newspaper. And the $5 weekly allowance she got from ruffling through coat pockets in the cloakroom when everyone else was at church? “Most of the damn pockets are empty these days,” she says with a sigh, knowing the special treat of a hot school lunch once a week is now a thing of the past.

But she’s no slouch. To help her family make ends meet and to buy that hot lunch now every other week, Angela took a job three months ago stocking shelves at Target. “They’ve treated me well,” she says. “Just had my 90-day review and got a 15 cents an hour raise. Can’t beat that these days. I always like to be saving up for something that I have my eye on – a new pair of socks, a toothbrush, a package of gum.” She hopes the temporary holiday position she signed on for turns into a permanent gig, but her manager reminds her constantly there are no guarantees.
“Yeah, I fall asleep in class a lot more often now, but I’m the Cardboard Connection in my neighborhood now,” she boasts. She recently moved her mother and two younger siblings into a shack made of detergent cases her Target manager lets her take home. “They’re a lot sturdier,” she says. “They hold up against the wind, and since, they’re waxed, they keep the rain out. They beat the Heier boxes we moved into in November.” She’s saving up now for pallets she hopes will raise the house off the frozen earth.

It’s impossible, of course, to quantify how many of Scoville’s similarly affluent parents have trimmed expenses in recent months – or how many of their offspring, in turn, have sought either formal employment or Foster care. But interviews with dozens of teenagers, parents or care guardians, parole officers and discount store managers suggest that many youngsters from the area’s well-to-do families have found a new work ethic as their parents or guardians lose their jobs and the jars of loose change they had squirreled away for retirement. That has led, however, to less spending money for toilet paper or binges at Wal-Mart.

In Aberdeen, Idaho, a battered waferboard bulletin board near city hall that connects high school students with nearby job opportunities attracts a huddled mass of sixty or so teens every day since September, up from about ten to 20 last fall, but part of that might be that the bulletin board provides an excellent windbreak from the area’s strong winter gales.

Beau Howard says he stood at the board every afternoon for two weeks until he noticed it had jobs posted on the windward side. He quickly found a job shoveling rotten potatoes out of a nearby cellar. “I didn’t want to bug my parents for extra cash,” he said, resting on the shovel handle and holding his bare right foot out of the muck while the foreman had his back turned. “I figure if I can keep this up for another couple weeks, I’ll have enough money to buy that right boot. That way, I can walk past that ‘No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service’ sign at McDonalds without guilt and join my buddies there every other Saturday night.”