It's Great to Know that Lewes Still Includes Some of its Originals

I have sometimes wondered what my old neighbor John Ellsworth is up to lately. According to the News Journal this morning, John is now building a land-speed record style racer in an attempt to break the 200-mph barrier.

That's pretty cool. And it is in keeping with what I know of John. It also means that my town has not yet completely become just another retirement village for wealthy folks from up-state and elsewhere. We still have some of our uniqueness.

Back in the late 1980s, when Karen and I were first married, we rented a small apartment above the shop next door to John and Hope's place on West Third Street. John owns the town blacksmith shop, but has always done much more than smithing. He was one of the founders of Punkin Chunkin, but left that sport when it went from a collection of individually designed rotary-arm flingers, trebuchets and John's own truck-sized cross-bow style punkin shooter to a contest of ever more-powerful compressed-air cannons.

"You couldn't see the pumpkin flying," he said. "I didn't like that at all. The fun was watching the pumpkins, and with the air cannons, you can't see them. You don't see it go through the air. Just a big whoosh, and that's it."

I agree with him completely. While I still think Punkin Chunkin is cool, and I'm proud that my state is still its home, it lost its charm for me when the air cannons took over.

But throwing pumpkins was never all there was to John Ellsworth. He created marvelous ironwork gates, fences and other items for homes around the area. He ran a herd of small, hand-carved cattle in front of his shop. He had a cement plant there as well; stalks of rebar topped with cement-chunk foliage. In the spring, the cement plant bloomed with small, pretty, yellow cement trucks.

And one year, for the Lewes Christmas Parade, he created a giant, house-tall metal rocking horse for his wife, Hope, to ride down the parade route.

Now there's long, open wheel, lakester-style racer under construction on West Third. John has exceeded 100-mph and hopes to top 200 next year.

"If you ever wanted to put your right foot down and hold it down, it's a hoot," he said. "The parachute coming out was probably the neatest part. It wasn't a jerk of any kind. It was like 'Star Wars' when they came out of warp speed and everything just slows down. You can't tell when it was deployed or anything. You just all of a sudden felt a deceleration."

It's great to know that John is still finding new challenges and ways to have fun. He was a pleasant neighbor; always interesting, challenging, and inspiring.

I moved to Lewes in the mid 1980s in part because it was a real town, with wealthy and modest homes, with folks from different races, with working fisherfolk and factories and with a certain amount of hustle and bustle. And with originals.

Over the years, we've lost much of our diversity, but I'm thrilled to find we still have some of what makes our town special.

Floor it, John.

Fun With Flag Graphics

The web site We Are Multicolored has a nifty little flash tool up that lets you choose three nations and mash-up the elements of their flags. I chose the flags of the United State, the United Kingdom, and Trinidad and Tobago. The site includes information about the symbolism of each element. It's educational, but I was just having fun with art.

''Oh, my god, the fan fiction.''

StumpJumper, over at Denied Intervention, points us to a story in the New York Times about the sexual orientation of a major character in the Harry Potter books: J.K. Rowling Outs Hogwarts Character.

At a reading and Q&A session, author Rowling was asked by a young fan whether Albus Dumbledore, the powerful and positive grandfather figure who leads the Hogwarts School of Wizardry and Magic, ever finds "true love."

"Dumbledore is gay," the author responded to gasps and applause.

I don't think Ms. Rowling intended to imply that being gay precludes finding true love. She went on to explain that the great wizard had had a tragic love affair earlier in life. I think that puts him into the "only one great love" category of fictional folk.

My take on elderly deus-ex-old-guy characters like Dumbledore is that they exist beyond the age of any romantic entanglement. And for the span of time covered by the Potter that seems to be the case.

Of course, any good writer will know the back-story of all of her characters. And given that a percentage of any group of humans is gay, it makes sense that there should be some gay folks in Harry Potter's world.

Time to Turn the Page

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman makes a good point today: 9/11 is over.

9/11 has made us stupid. I honor, and weep for, all those murdered on that day. But our reaction to 9/11 — mine included — has knocked America completely out of balance, and it is time to get things right again.

I think he's right. We cannot forget, but we mustn't endlessly dwell on 9/11. It's starting to change who we are, and not for the good.

Banned Books Week

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathon Swift
Originally uploaded by hatcher.library

The week of September 29 through October 6 is Banned Books Week. This is a week when those of us who read should remember those books that folks, for a wide variety of reasons, have tried to take out of our hands.

The list is long and diverse. Would-be censors right, left and center have all challenged books. The urge to stifle thought that we don't agree with is universal; we all have a duty to combat that urge within ourselves.

It is interesting to note that more than "banned" books, we now speak of "challenged" books. These are books that someone is trying to keep us from reading, either by banning or by raising an un-holy stink about them.

The American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom points to this quote from Ray Bradbury (author of Fahrenheit 451):

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

Thus we see campaigns that complain loudly about certain books. They may or may not call for book-banning, but they all can lead librarians, teachers, parents and readers to shy away from certain books. And that is not good.

A Season Ends

This evening, we attended the final show of the 2007 season of the Rehoboth Summer Children's Theatre. We saw a delightful performance of their version of The Wizard of Oz.

It was a special occasion for a few reasons. Not only was it the last night of the Theatre's 26th season in Rehoboth, but it was also the final performance in the basement Fellowship Hall of Epworth United Methodist Church on Baltimore Avenue in Rehoboth Beach. The Epworth congregation is building a new sanctuary, pre-school and other facilities just outside of Rehoboth, off Route One. It's likely that the Theatre will move many of their performances there next summer, though they are still looking for space within Rehoboth; they'd like to maintain some ties to their history in the beach block.

And we were treated to a rare performance by both of the founders of the Rehoboth Summer Children's Theatre: Steve and Elise Seyfried, who founded the Theatre in 1982. Because the young actress who usually performs this show with Steve has headed back to college, Elise (who co-wrote the play and originated the RSCT version of Dorothy) joined her husband on stage.

Coincidentally, the Wizard of Oz was the first show performed by the two Seyfrieds when they started the Theatre.

They still get to play together this way every once in a while; it's always fun to see. Steve and Elise have an ease, a rapport, a spark that only comes from sharing a life, raising a family, and nurturing a theater together.

The experience left Karen and I reminiscing. We've known Steve and Elise as summer friends for some 15 years (maybe more). We first saw them perform together when Elsie was pregnant with her youngest child; Julie, a delightful young lady and good friend of our youngest. I spent about a decade on the Theatre's Board of Trustees. And I still maintain the Theatre web site as a favor to Steve.

We're sad to see them pack up their stage and head home to the Philly area, but we're glad we know them and their impressive kids. Remind me to tell you some time about the Chamber Music Festival Elise and her oldest son founded some years ago here in Lewes.

Count Me in the "Reader" Column

The AP is reporting a poll that found that a quarter of US adults read no books in the last year.

The survey reveals a nation whose book readers, on the whole, can hardly be called ravenous. The typical person claimed to have read four books in the last year -- half read more and half read fewer. Excluding those who hadn't read any, the usual number read was seven.

That's not good. In an era in which we worry about our nation falling behind others economically, this slide away from knowledge and culture can only hurt us.

I am a reader. It is an activity that has given me joy, comfort, knowledge, and peace for almost 40 years now. (Assuming I date the start of my reading to around First Grade.) And I am probably ravenous reader. I probably average about one book each week.

It works for me.

Some Newspaper Editor Has My Sense of Humor

This headline from today's News Journal is simply wonderful:

Md. sex-ed plan includes sex education

The accompanying text explains that the Maryland Board of Education has ruled that the Sex-Ed curriculum in Montgomery County, Maryland, may indeed include educational information about sex.

Happy Fourth of July

Tom has posted the text of the Declaration of Independence over at TommyWonk. The Fourth is always a good time to re-read this document and reflect on why and how our nation came into being.

This year, it's more than ever true.

I thought about posting earlier this week on the commutation of Scooter Libby's prison sentence. It does, after all, symbolize the state of our nation today.

I couldn't do it. I'm too depressed about where we've come to. I'm exasperated. I'm angry.

And yet there is a small germ of hope. People do protest. People do speak up. We may yet return to the ideals expressed in memorable prose 231 years ago.

Happy Fourth.

So, You Want One of Them iPhone Thingies?

I don't know if you noticed, but there was a frenzy yesterday. A frenzy over a new product.

Folks from all around the nation lined up, camped out, waited sometimes patiently for a chance to spend a good deal of money on a shiny new tech-toy.

Was it worth it? Time will tell.

I do understand the desire for an iPhone. It's smaller. Faster. Shinier. Packs lots of other products into little space.

But do we really need it? We already have tools that serve the functions found in the iPhone. We just don't have them all in one small place.

The iPhone may be like the iPod. Eventually, we may all have one. But I think I will wait for a bit. I don't need to spend that much money for functionality that I already have. And I'm put off by the fact that the iPhone only works with ATT; their monthly plans for the use of the thing seem pretty steep.

I can wait.

Say What?

The head of the FCC was pretty upset about an appeals court ruling that criticized FCC for its handing of some recent indecency complaints. The court ruled that the FCC had been arbitrary in its handling of what were more or less accidental droppings of several common expletives.

So FCC Chairman Kevin Martin dropped a few of his own in his statement in response. The Wall Street Journal's Washington Wire has several quotes in a post called FCC Warning: Explicit Anger.

Don't worry, the Journal has obscured the "**k" and "**t" in Mr. Martin's many uses of “f—” and “s—”.

Half a Century Later...

The first digital image was created 50 years ago this spring at the National Bureau of Standards (now known as the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST). It was a very small scanned photo of researcher Russell Kirsch's 3-month-old son Walden.

That was the first step in a journey that has led to on-line photo-sharing sites like flickr and to high-resolution aerial photography and to citizen journalism and an on-line explosion in the arts.

Of course, it also led to pervasive digital pornography and photo-shopped political frame-jobs.

But you take the good with the bad.

Lewes' Silent Protests are Heard in the New York Times

Those of us who live in Lewes have gotten used to the weekly silent protests that take place each Sunday afternoon at the intersection of Kings Highway and Savannah Road. Today, there's a New York Times article about them: Silence Speaks Volumes at Intersection of Views on Iraq War. (Reg. Req.)

Anti-war protesters began gathering for a silent vigil each week back in 2004. Eventually pro-war demonstrators started to counter them and, for a time, things were fairly ugly.

After the peace vigil began in 2004, a group of counterprotesters began convening across the street. Some of the younger members of that group brought a radio and blared John Philip Sousa marching songs and patriotic music like “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Occasionally they yelled unkind things through a megaphone. At one point, fish guts and manure were strewn along the grass where the peace vigil meets.

Eventually, though, the pro-war side thinned out to one very faithful, but very polite gentleman. He is occasionally joined by others, but the ugliness is gone.

Tommywonk has picked up on one of the central points about this story; that it is possible to disagree civilly with each other about this war. I think that when you find someone on the other side of the question whose beliefs are deeply held, and honestly tested, you generally find the ability to disagree with grace.

I was struck by another aspect of the story. The Times noted that it is appropriate for this sort of protest to take place in a small town, since, it says, small towns have borne the brunt of war casualties.

About half of American military casualties in Iraq have come from towns with fewer than 25,000 residents. Among rural states, Delaware has the second-highest death rate, with 60 deaths per million military-age people, according to an analysis by William O’Hare of the Carsey Institute, a rural research center based at the University of New Hampshire, which has studied the demographics of soldiers fighting in the war.

Of course, we need to bear in mind that this is a rate of deaths, and not an actual number. Delaware's population is still less than million. Still, it is sobering and it led to me to a little searching to see how many Delawareans have lost their lives in this war. According to a casualty database from (I think) the AP and linked from the News Journal Site, 14 men and women who called Delaware home have died. I'm sure there are others whose home state was no loner Delaware, but who have family and friends here.

And this is a good say to point out that even though I oppose this foolish war, and think we were wrong to invade Iraq, I honor these men and women and all the men and women who serve our nation. That our President has made a terrible mistake is not their fault; in fact they suffer the consequences of that mistake and do their best every day to make it right.

Today, as every day, they will be in my thoughts.

Here's a Movie I'd Really Like to See

A new documentary about the life of Joe Strummer has opened over in England. I'm not sure if it is out yet here in the US. The film is called The Future is Unwritten, and it looks fascinating.

Joe Strummer was a guitarist and front man for one of my all-time favorite rock bands, the Clash, who helped me define my youth.

As I have written before, I remain a Strummer fan. He was at the heart of the great Punk Rock explosion of the 1970s, but he transcended that genre; he was a classic rock rebel and cultural revolutionary.

I think it is telling that one of his last recordings was a duet with Johnny Cash, singing Bob Marley's "Redemption Song."

I still carry Joe Strummer's voice in my head. It seems comfortable there with Jerry's guitar sound.

Will we see this film down at Movies at Midway? Or will there remain three screens of Spiderman 3?

I Doubt This Will Surprise Those Who Know Me...

...But it appears that I am an "Information Technology Omnivore," according to an on-line tech-use survey from the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

The survey is part of a Pew study, A Typology of Information and Communication Technology Users, which attempts to describe the many different ways that we use our suite of information technology tools. According to the Pew study, "85% of American adults use the Internet or cell phones – and most use both." On the other hand, about half of Americans "have a more distant or non-existent relationship to modern information technology."

In other words, many have the tools and many use them, but only a small percentage are really comfortable in an on-line world.

It looks like I am one of this group, about 8% of the American public. The Omnivorous Tech Users are described as embracing the connectivity provided by technology to enhance their work lives and personal lives:

Members of this group use their extensive suite of technology tools to do an enormous range of things online, on the go, and with their cell phones. Omnivores are highly engaged with video online and digital content. Between blogging, maintaining their Web pages, remixing digital content, or posting their creations to their websites, they are creative participants in cyberspace.

I don't exhibit all of the characteristics of this group. I don't create video content very much and I don't IM or text message beyond what is required to keep tabs on a teen-age child. And I am well outside one of the key demographic characteristics: "The median age is 28; just more than half of them are under age 30."

I do feel old some days.

Ironically, two co-workers and I explored this same territory in a slightly different way yesterday. We had all heard keynote speaker Don Cooke talking about Second Life at the recent Delaware GIS Conference. That led to a discussion of on-line communities and some of the skills needed to maintain and grow them. I've been thinking about this a fair amount lately, in relation to my work with Delaware's GIS Community, and the National GIS Coordinators group (NSGIC) both of which are partly on-line.

Dave wondered aloud which world, the physical or the on-line, was, in fact, reality. We briefly considered the theory proposed in the film The Matrix (the first one), that what we perceive as reality is in fact a simulated, virtual reality dream world constructed and maintained to keep the entire human population in a state of subjugated sleep.

We skipped the obvious contemporary political implications of this thought and turned briefly to Plato's allegory of the cave in which what humans perceive as reality is in fact only the shadows of a puppet show cast on the wall of a cave in which they are prisoners (/oversimplification of complex philosophical thought).

At that point we realized that once you've pursued a thought back to Plato's cave, it's probably time to move on to something else.

As I write this blog entry, it occurs to me that one could rewrite Plato's allegory in modern terms with the Internet as the cave and blogs and web 2.0 things creating the shadows.

But there is a sunny Saturday morning outside and the grass needs to be cut. The library needs to be walked to. The state park is hosting a kayak expo.

I may be an Information Technology Omnivore, but I know when it is time to shut down the laptop and head outside.

Sometimes I Like to Join the Crowd

I joined in a worldwide "all take a photo at the same time" event today.

The project, ShutterClock, was the brainchild of Ronan Murphy, who is finishing his college career (I think somewhere in the UK).

That's Ronan on the left there, in his entry into his own project, which he describes fairly simply:

We want people to come together as a simple community divided only by distance to globally capture their world at an organised time. In return we will see galleries of images from all over the world, taken at the same moment but from their point of view.

I learned about this idea from the flickr blog this morning. It sounded like fun. All I really had to do was keep my camera by me at the end of the afternoon and keep an eye on the clock. The project was set for people to take their photos at 8:00 p.m. GMT (4:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time).

As it turned out, my photo was of a prosaic "afternoon in the office" sort of moment.

That's my keyboard and screen, with the agenda for a meeting I'm hosting on Monday morning on the left.

I uploaded my photo to the ShutterClock group at flickr. Some folks sent pictures directly to the ShutterClock site, where there are a selection of the photos. There was even a phone number to facilitate submission directly from camera phones.

Sometimes it's fun to be a small part of something larger.

A Simple Rule

Two stories on the News Journal web site this morning crystallized a thought that's been taking shape in my mind for a while now: Don't be a Jackass.

In the first story, a group of University of Delaware students are in some trouble for dressing up in costumes for a Cinco de Mayo party that seem to have been inspired by the worst possible racist stereotypes of Latinos. Photographs ended up, as they tend to do, on-line. Local Latino groups were not amused.

To their credit, the students appear to realize that they were being jerks, and have apologized.

The second story is that of attorney Richard Abbott, who has been reprimanded by the Delaware Supreme Court for "undignified or discourteous conduct." He submitted a brief in one of his many lawsuits comparing a board of appointed citizens to a group of monkeys:

"A citizen board does not mean that its members are given license to ignore the legal standards which govern their decisions. Otherwise the county would be permitted to appoint a group of monkeys . . . and simply allow the [county] attorney to interpret the grunts and groans of the ape members." (This quote from Mr. Abbott's brief is from the excellent Delaware Grapevine coverage of this story)

Attorney Abbott is loudly complaining the reprimand is a product of political correctness and violates his free speech rights. He says he broke no laws.

That's true, but he was being a jerk and I think that the court is within its rights to reprimand a member of the bar for being a jerk.

My new golden rule comes from a novel I read recently. I read widely and shallowly, for sheer pleasure, and so can't recall what the novel was, nor who the author. But I do remember that the novel was set in a small town that a sheriff had successfully policed for decades by holding everyone to one simple rule: Don't be a Jackass.

We all have free speech rights. But we also have a responsibility to not be jerks about it. We're not five-year olds, though we often sound like it.

There are, as I write this, about 100 reader comments on the UD/Cinco de Mayo story on the News Journal web site. I sampled a few earlier in the day. Based on the comments left on the News Journal web site -- on this story and on others I've read lately -- the readers of that paper, at least on-line, are mean, racist, xenophobic, and largely anonymous.

And, being anonymous, they feel free to violate that first principle of civilized society: Don't be a Jackass.

Karen Was Right

When we're out on the road, and some other driver is being an aggressive jerk, Karen always warns me against going macho/testosteronial with the admonition "you don't know; he may have a gun."

As it turns out, she is right. An aggressive jerk driver was arrested by state police today.

A loaded handgun and prescription drugs were found in his car, according to police.

The drugs were Valium. If only he'd had a few, he might not have been so aggressive.

Tom's Dark Epiphany

Shortly after inventing his Edison Recording Machine, Tom sat listening to a wax cylinder of music.

All of a sudden, the years opened before him. He heard generations of recorded music: symphonic, impressionist, minstrel singers and crooners, blues both country and urban, worksongs, jazz, rock and roll, country pop, jam-bands and hiphop.

He heard and saw a musical future enabled by his own inspiration and work.

Then he saw a singing contest, judged by a strange trio: a clownish bear, a trained seal, and a dyspeptic clergyman. He saw democracy harnessed to this contest; its voter participation outstripping any actual election.

A title appeared in his mind's eye: American Idol. And he wept.

The Title Should Be Ours....

There is a National Chicken Cooking Contest. Delaware's entry is the author of the Wilmington food blog The Shell Pot; she is also a part of the life of Richard Koehler, our own Honest Hypocrite.

Watch Rich's blog for regular updates.

It seems evident to me that, if there is a national contest around the cooking of chicken, Delaware should always win. Otherwise, why am I eating chicken at every statewide event I attend?