A Sign of Trouble?

This is probably way too over-simplified an analysis, but I can't help thinking that this image, from the News Journal's story on risky borrowing, is symptomatic of what our basic mistake was.

If we can't get the grammar right, what makes us think we can handle complex financial affairs?

Minor Observation #527

I think I have finally figured out why some of the top pop hits of today grate so fearfully on my nerves. I'm a kind Dad and sometimes let my daughters listen to Hits One on the Sirius radio. Some of the tunes played are quite good. Some make me want to leap screaming from my moving Prius.

It's not just the overtly sexual lyrics which would have given me pause even when I was a horny 18-year-old. It's not just the unimaginative melodies and over-processed, faked-up singing. It's not even the deliberate "stoopid-ness" of the personae adopted by the performers.

No, what really makes me cringe is the fact that, of late, producers have been sampling heavily from the most over-played pop of the 1980s to build the music-montages over which their singers rap, croon or mumble. They've appropriated songs that were big hits at a time when pop music was at its most fake, unimaginative and tedious. And the songs they are (re)using were horribly over-played in the 1980s.

There was some good music produced in the 1980s. But it wasn't what made it as "pop hits." I still listen to some music from the 1980s. But I was sick of these hit songs 20 years ago. Adding new lyrics and beats hasn't helped.

Is This Who We Have Become?

I heard a story the other day that troubles me. Actually, it is more the reaction the story provoked that I find troubling. It says something about our tendency towards a "mobocracy."

The story was told to a group of civic leaders. It was about an issue before an elected body here in Delaware. The teller had been advocating an unpopular position to that elected body in a room filled with a raucous crowd in opposition. He reported that there was one person there who he knew agreed with him, but that person was afraid to speak up because of the vocal crowd.

He finished the story and the group all laughed. Open discourse on a public issue was stifled by fear of a mob and we found that funny.

It reminded me of some of the stories that have come out of the Indian River School District religion lawsuit. Families wanting to speak on an issue to the school board that is supposed to represent them were afraid of an angry mob.

It also brings to mind the very strong reaction that many folks had a few days back to what appears now to have been a doubtful report of anti-Islam/anti-Obama statements by an elementary school teacher. When folks thought that report was accurate, there were calls for direct, and rather stern, action against a school teacher. Subsequent reports that call the original into question got much less attention.

Are we a mob, ruled by our passions? That is not who we are meant to be. Yet recent events suggest that we may be on our way to becoming that mob.

I hope not. At the very least, I don't think it is funny.

Be Nice... Or Go to Hell

There's an interesting commentary on the web site of the Guardian newspaper today about maintaining some sense of proportion and decency in on-line forums.

In "How do you deal with the trolls and idiots on comment boards?", Andrew Brown starts by quoting Keith Richards (Johnny Depp's pirate Dad for you youngsters) and goes on to suggest that the model that is starting to develop around the web calls for a bit of slack, some trust, but also a firm hand when needed:

All of this requires unending effort. It is like gardening, a constant watch against pests and the bindweed of organised stupidity.

Words of wisdom that the News Journal may want to heed in managing their on-line comments. They say they don't moderate discussion forums about their articles, but that message is most often seen in noting deleted rudeness. They should probably bite the bullet and make that a full-time job for someone.

I get a few nasty comments here from time to time. Most I can ignore. A few have to be removed. It's part of the deal.

Wondering about that "go to hell" above? Mr. Brown points to the Christian site Ship of Fools, which maintains a section of its forums called Hell -- "the refuge of the irascible, the contentious and the just plain pissed off."

So if you don't like it here... you know....

Say it Sadly: "Yoi!"

Myron Cope has died. The gravel-voiced sportswriter and broadcaster was a tradition in Pittsburgh, where he was remembered by an editorial writer at the Tribune-Review:

Myron was made in Pittsburgh. Unabashedly a hometown fan, he parroted no one's ideas or sports cliches and copied no one's broadcasting style. He was, for good and occasionally for bad, true only to himself.

I'm a Redskins fan, but I appreciated Myron Cope, and I'm sorry to see him go. (Via: My Blog is Your Blog Too)

Glad That's Over?

The News Journal has a story up this evening reporting partial settlement of the Indian River School District prayer lawsuit. This has been going on for a while now.

The district was sued some time ago for making non-Christians feel explicitly unwelcome. The school board got fairly defensive about the whole thing. In fact, according to this evening's article, the part of the suit that spoke to the Board's own public prayer was left unresolved.

Otherwise, there is a financial settlement (to be paid by the District's insurance) and "an extensive list of new policies and procedures that the school board must adopt." I'll be very interested to read that list.

Ironically, the Indian River District made, if not the news, the Letters to the Editor page in the last few days for a similar complaint. That one is too young, and a bit in doubt. But the echoes are chilling.

UPDATE: The News Journal now has a more detailed story on this settlement.

We Need to Think About Changing Our Sex Offender Laws

The headline from the News Journal web site tells part of the story: Ailing sex offender chokes to death at Dover clinic.

A 22-year-old Huntington's disease victim who was denied a bed in a state health care facility because he was a registered sex offender choked to death today at a Dover mental health clinic.

We, as a culture, have a tendency to over-react and write sweeping laws in response to problems. Our sex offender laws may be causing problems we could avoid.

Here's a Fun Headline...

Abu Dhabi trounces Delaware in license-plate auction

Saeed Abdel Ghaffar Khouri bought Abu Dhabi license plate number 1 for 52.2 million dirhams ($14 million) at a charity auction this week. That beats the $675,000 paid recently for Delaware's Number 6.

"We wanted to be No. 1," Khouri's brother Hamdan Khouri told reporters after the sale. "Who doesn't like to be the best in the world?"

Indeed. (Right you are, Ken)

I like the implication that Delaware is a natural competitor for Abu Dhabi and the United Arab Emerites.

Update (2/21/08): The car-focused AutoBlog has taken notice of the recent series of high-price/low-number license tag sales. They have a post up today about Delaware's sale of number 6. They also point to a sale, for $870,000, of the "F1" plate in Great Britain, and have a post about the car-chic in the UAE. In all three cases, the car-conscious readers at AutoBog are mostly critical of this form of investment.

The National Portrait Gallery Has A Sense of Humor

We were in northern Virginia this week-end for a dance competition in Crystal City. Our daughters were in dance classes all day on Saturday and part of Sunday; they performed in competition Saturday evening. They did quite well, thank you.

While we were not needed Saturday afternoon, Karen and I went wandering by Metro with a few friends. We visited the National Portrait Museum, where, among other exhibits, there hangs the Steven Colbert portrait.

Colbert has been airing a several-part series lately about his efforts to get the serial portrait from the set of his Colbert Report added to a museum in Washington. The Portrait Gallery people agreed to play along, for a while, and have placed the Colbert Portrait between the Men's and Women's rooms outside the gallery of presidential portraits on the second floor.

It is drawing a crowd.

We found folks photographing the portrait or having their own portrait photographed with Colbert's. And lots of people standing around to watch.

It made it a bit hard to get to the Men's room.

We're All In This Thing Together

There has been an interesting convergence of on-line collaboration this week that I think highlights the value of sharing our stuff out on the net. The internet provides a space in which a ridiculously large number of people can share, comment on, and react to a wide variety of ideas and works of art. And I think that is a good thing.

Here are a few examples, from my limited web-cruising, and from just this week.

Flickr has announced the formation of a Commons, in which they hope to facilitate a community-wide collective tagging and adding of attributes to publicly available photo collections. It has grown out of the ability of flickr users to add descriptive tags to other users' photos.

All that work that we've put in has contributed to making something greater than the sum of its parts: an organic information system, derived of descriptive words and phrases made entirely from individual contributions.

The Library of Congress has stepped up to the plate to help get things moving by posting about 3,000 photos from their archives and inviting users to add tags, descriptions, and further information. The project gives another window into the rich photographic history of the nation, and may just add a deep new understanding of the material in those collections.

From the Library’s perspective, this pilot project is a statement about the power of the Web and user communities to help people better acquire information, knowledge and—most importantly—wisdom. One of our goals, frankly, is to learn as much as we can about that power simply through the process of making constructive use of it.

The old-photos blog Shorpy (a favorite of mine) provides some moderately ironic proof of concept. Shorpy takes selected photographs from the Library of Congress' older site, which has traditionally offered thumbnail views and possible click-thrus to raw images, and prepares them for on-line viewing. In a sense, it has been a precursor to the new Library of Congress effort with flickr; it colleted information via blog-style commenting.

Yesterday, the same day as the flickr/Library of Congress announcement, Shorpy posted a photograph of the Drake Family, and father and two sons musical group, playing at a dance in Texas in 1942. The posting was spotted and commented-on by two daughters and a grand-daughter of the young men shown playing music so long ago. They added fascinating and personal details about the photo.

Meanwhile, in my professional life, I came across an announcement by the real-estate map service Zillow that they have released GIS data of the neighborhood boundaries that they use in their maps. Their intent, they said, was "to allow people to use and contribute to our growing database" by inviting users to add new neighborhoods, or suggest edits to those already in the collection. And users can post their work back to Zillow for eventual integration into Zillow's on-line offerings.

This is a form of on-line collaborative work that requires a bit more specialized software, but it follows the same pattern as the Flickr/Library of Congress and Shorpy models -- the collective knowledge and group energy of a web-full of regular folks can add a remarkable amount of knowledge to our culture.

John Mayer Sticks Up for an Ex

Singer, songwriter and excellent guitarist John Mayer has a blog post up this evening in defense of Jessica Simpson. Mayer dated Ms. Simpson for a bit before she dated Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo. He is responding here to the uproar over Mr. Romo's brief vacation with Ms. Simpson prior to the Cowboys loss to the Giants.

John Mayer's point is that, in his opinion, knowing Ms. Simpson as he does, it is not right to suggest that Ms. Simpson was knowingly undermining the Cowboys quarterback:

All witty barbs, blogs, and fashion policing aside, that girl loves Texas more than you know. It's one of her most defining traits as a person. So please don't try and take that away from her. (You probably wouldn't be able to, but it's less work for all involved.)

For what its worth, I can say that I don't think that Tony Romo's vacation had any major effect on his play. He wasn't that bad; and I say that as a lifelong Redskins fan and hater of the Dallas Cowboys. In fact, as much as it pains me to say it, I agree with Terrell Owens; that was a team loss.

Actually, seeing the Cowboys lose as a team was pretty sweet, from my couch.

Some Things Never Change (At Least Not In Their Essential Nature)

I've been searching through the archives of the New York Times lately, looking for references I can use in building-out my family tree. I came, by chance, across the following item in "City and Suburban News" for September 11 of 1879:

Yesterday a spurious Custom-house agent swindled Mrs. James Brooks, of 44 East Twenty-fifth-street, of $9 98 by the old ruse of pretending that that amount was due for duties on a package that had arrived from Europe and was lying in the Custom-house. Such swindles are common.

Replace "Custom-house agent" with "exiled government official;" replace "duties on a package" with "bank fees for a transfer of funds;" and replace "Europe" with "Nigeria" and the whole thing looks like something we (hopefully) now routinely mark as spam and delete from our in-boxes.

Fox Appropriates Family Dog, Cultural and Economic Debate Ensues

A family in Baltimore spotted a familiar face during a Fox football broadcast last month. It was their family dog, Truman, in a photo they had posted to Flickr that was apparently harvested by the television network and used to "holiday-up" their broadcast of a game between the Saints and the Eagles.

This prompted a blog post by dog-owner Tracey Gaughran-Perez and, many comments later, a call from the Washington Post which led to 1) some (moderately) contrite reaction from Fox, and, 2) a story in the paper (Hey, Isn't That . . .).

The Post story takes a larger look at the growing issue of copyright infringement in a culture that is on-line and connected and very, very open. People are starting to point to a basic hypocrisy in large corporations on the one hand zealously enforcing copyright against individuals while on the other hand violating individual copyrights with seeming impunity.

The story also makes an interesting point about how the culture of on-line, personal and real is leading advertisers and corporations away from the traditionally false and contrived material they have long used in advertising and corporate communications.

It's a byproduct of the user-generated world: the trustworthiness of YouTube, the realness of Facebook. Above all else, we believe ourselves. "People don't want to buy the fake from the phony anymore," Pine says. "They want to buy the real from the genuine."

This story caught my eye in part because I am an active flickr-er. I place a Creative Commons "Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative" copyright on my photos, which, in theory, protects them from unauthorized commercial use. I do the same, by the way, with content on this blog.

I have found unauthorized use of content from Mike's Musings in the past. I found a post from this blog pasted into an ad-spam blog. These are blogs that scrape content from bloggers to give their ad-sites something for google and other search sites to find. In that case, when I e-mailed the site's owners they apologized and took my content off their site.

I have not yet found any of my photos taken without permission. That doesn't mean it hasn't happened, though. There have been several cases where I have been asked for permission to use photos. I have given the travel guides site Schmap permission to use shots I have taken in the Florida Keys and at the Statue of Liberty. I have granted permission to the Cape Gazette to use a few shots in backgrounds on their site as well. And I have given permission for their use in a few publications; there was an economic development brochure for a small city in New York, and a set of state-themed poems published as postcards.

I have not yet tried to make any money of my work; I'm usually happy to help out local institutions or non-profit groups. That doesn't mean I wouldn't be interested in making some small amount of cash, however, if Fox or CNN or MSNBC or someone wanted to use a photo of mine in their election coverage.

RIP (and Thank You) George Macdonald Fraser

I was saddened to learn of the death yesterday of the author George Macdonald Fraser. Fraser, a Scot, created the Flashman series of novels, which have given me a great deal of pleasure over the years. He was 82. The cause of death was cancer.

Fraser had served in India during World War and worked as a journalist in Glasgow before becoming an author and screenwriter. The original Flashman novel started that portion of his career in the late 1960's. In it, he took a minor character in 19th century literature and imagined him into one of the greatest cads in English fiction. His novels are great fun and feature well-researched and accurate historical people, places, and actions.

He also wrote a wonderful memoir of his military service (Quartered Safe Out Here), and a series of short-stories inspired by that period of his life (the "McAuslan" stories). He wrote a parody of pirate books (The Pyrates) and a handful of novels set in Victorian and Elizabethan England. His screenplays included several "musketeers" movies and Force Ten from Navarone.

George Macdonald Fraser was a fine writer. He has left us an impressive body of work. Thank you, sir.

In Troubled Times, Where Shall a Bruised Nation Turn for Soothing Ironic Distance?

I found myself drawn to this recent headline from The Onion: Nation's Crumbling Infrastructure Probably Some Sort Of Metaphor.

The satirical "newspaper" recounts recent infrastructure failures and notes that these failures are "forcing many to question whether the nation's rapidly deteriorating roads, contaminated drinking water and groundwater, and run-down schools could perhaps be a metaphor for something."

"Everywhere you turn you see improperly maintained railways, structurally deficient bridges—not to mention billions of gallons of untreated sewage flowing directly into our groundwater," said Adam Perry, a representative for the ASCE. "Is there an underlying message here? There are so many layers, and each one is so subtle and nuanced, that I'm hesitant to make any kind of blanket statement about what this means 'for America.'"

"I think our overstretched and increasingly obsolete infrastructure might symbolize something important," Perry added. "But what?"

I find myself missing that sort of irony-heavy satirical commentary now that the TV-writers' strike has darkened the nation's airwaves. I wonder where to turn for the acerbic commentary I once depended on The Daily Show to provide.

As it happens, commercial television is not the only place to find such content. As we turn away from reality-TV, we are rediscovering thoughtful, written cynicism in all manner of formats, from traditional printed books and magazines to on-line blogs and, for the more adventurous, personal conversation.

Aside from The Onion, there are other goofy-news sites such as ScrappleFace, McSweeney's and the (somewhat NSFW) Daily Mash over in the United Kingdom. There are sites featuring humorous writing in general, such as Francesco Explains It All. And the TV writers are creating new on-line video content in their own cause at Speechless.

So, as the writers' strike drags into a new year, and we resign ourselves to television without great wit, people around the nation are re-discovering the joys of literature, learning about alternate media, and indulging in conversation.

And some -- a brave few -- are starting to express their own, very personal, satire.

The Participation Generation

The old-photos blog Shorpy has had a few pictures up lately showing everyday folks making music back in the 1940s. The one at left shows a pick-up band at a Florida trailer park. An earlier entry shows "boys in the bunkhouse" gathered around a stove and a guitar.

These resonated for me with parts of an interview with Levon Helm I heard this morning on my commute. It was a rebroadcast of the December 11 edition of Fresh Air. Terry Gross was working through Helm's history and talking about his new album, Dirt Farmer, reflects the influences of his early life.

Levon Helm, once the drummer and a singer with The Band and a solo artist of some repute, has established a new tradition of regular in-studio house parties featuring a variety of great musicians at his place up in Woodstock. They started as a kind of rent-party a few years back when he was working through bankruptcy and recovering from throat cancer. They echo a style of house-party that was a part of his Arkansas childhood back in the 1940s and 50s.

Helm, musing on those sorts of parties and the fact that his father used to perform at some of them, used the phrase "participation generation" to refer back to a time when anyone might pick up a guitar, a fiddle, a washtub, or a beat-box and join in a pick-up band.

That's part of what I see in these photos.

Update: Here is an even better view of the jam session shown above.

Gee, Thanks for the Help

About.Com has an entry this week-end about our little state of Delaware from Jenny McKinney & Patrick McKinney. Jenny McKinney is a certified retirement coach. She and Patrick McKinney, a manual auditor for a major insurance company, take a look at Delaware, this week's state in their "Where to Live After Retirement" series.

Retirees are often vibrant and interesting people. But I'd like to think we can attract some young folks too.

How I Spent My Week-End

A few lines drawn on my forehead and from nose to mouth. A touch of eye-liner (but only on one eye). And a liberal amount of hair-white.

An eye-patch, black top-hat and voluminous black cloak. And a completely cool tail-coat with a rich-looking pattern and scads of gold braid all over it. I really liked that coat.

This picture is the MySpace-style self portrait that I couldn't help taking while in costume just before the first performance of the Nutcracker.

In the days before children (BC), Karen and I were active with the Possum Point Players, a local theater group. Karen played in the orchestra and I took small character parts or worked backstage doing sound, props or other crew work.

I sometimes miss doing shows. I hope to get back on stage more when the girls are driving themselves and off to college. It was fun to be out in front of an audience again, if only in a small part.

My Blue-Collar Village

I slept-in a bit this morning. We were all up very late rehearsing the Nutcracker Ballet, which goes before an audience this evening. I was awakened at by the 7:00 o'clock horn that sounds automatically each morning (Sundays excepted) from downtown. I believe the horn is mounted on the old power plant that used to provide all of our electricity and still serves as a power distribution point and shop for the Board of Public Works.

That horn reminds me that my small city -- Lewes, Delaware -- has very blue-collar roots. It blew each morning at seven to call the workers from their small frame houses in several neighborhoods of the old town, through mercantile downtown, past the busy fishing port, and to their jobs at the fish factories that once lined the Delaware Bay shore out towards Fort Miles and its shore defenses batteries.

The horn still calls out each morning. I sometimes hear it as I head out for my commute to Dover. On week-ends it occasionally calls me from my bed to my jobs around the house. The small frame worker's houses have been restored as mini-Victorians. Downtown's hardware store, five-n-dime and grocery have become a series of lovely boutiques. The working fishing boats have gone from the port, replaced by sailboats, tourist head-boats and the sleek powerboats of recreational anglers. The fish factories that once gave Lewes its distinctive odor have been plowed-under for a new crop of large beach-front and near beach-front homes. Some with full-time residents; many as vacation homes for people whose working life is hours away. Fort Miles lives on as a museum piece within Cape Henlopen State Park.

Lewes has changed in the 20 years I've lived here. Change is a constant in all life, of course, but my town has changed profoundly, I think. And not all for the best.

I remember when I first discovered Lewes. I had just begun working at a local radio station and was sent out as part of a remote broadcast from Lewes' Second Street. I loved it. It had high-end shops and a five-n-dime. The hardware store had hardwood floors and a hammered tin ceiling. The street was busy with both vacationers and local farmers and workers. It felt to me like what a small town in America should feel like. Rich and poor, white and black, workers and retirees all going about their several different sorts of business.

I knew that this was the sort of real town I wanted to be a part of. I was more familiar with Rehoboth Beach and Bethany Beach; resort towns I had visited each summer of my childhood. I love both of those towns. But, in looking for a place to settle, I wanted a year-round small town, not a busy summer resort. That was the Lewes I found.

Now, I find, my year-round working town filled with folks from all walks of life is becoming a place for wealthy people. Some are retired here. Some are here in their second homes as often as they can be and are looking ahead to retiring here.

Many of the shops are marketing to retirees and vacationers. There is still a small grocery, but for most day-to-day shopping I must leave town. The hardware store is gone. The five-n-dime is gone.

Work in Lewes is now largely retail. But retail workers can't afford to live here. There is still a hospital and medical professions abound. But, except for the Doctors, most who work in that part of Lewes' economy can't afford to live here. We're losing our economic and racial diversity. And we are losing our age-range diversity. At 45 I am often one of the youngest people at public meetings in town.

These changes hit me in the heart the other day. I was on the phone with a part-time resident who has become active in efforts to control growth around Lewes (a laudable effort). I am a part of the Lewes Planning Commission and so often find myself in conversations of this sort. I can't quote exactly what this woman told me, but it was something along the lines of "we must protect our lovely Village." I know she used the word "Village" because I remember thinking, "it's a city, dammit, please don't turn it into a quaint little retirement Village."

That's not who we were and not who we should be.

Some Things I Like (#567)

Getting Back to Basics

Artist Jason Salavon has created a new work based on the 2007 Ikea Catalog.

He has reduced it to its most basic elements, page lay-out and color.

(Via information aesthetics)