Oh, For The Love Of...

The following came in via e-mail today from the head of a local right-wing, anti-government, property-rights group:

Glenn Beck has announced he will be doing a series of documentaries on the history of the progressive movement. The first is this Friday.

The Glenn Beck program is on at 5 PM and 2 AM on the Fox News Channel. I have set my DVR.

I truly believe this series of documentaries will explain much of how we've gotten to where we are today.

Okay... I know this is ridiculous, but I also know that there are people who will take this seriously. And that makes me sad.

Roots of the Tea Party Party?

The "tea party" movement seemed to just appear last year. The link to the Boston Tea Party of colonial America seemed a little forced to me; why that connection? Why now?

Reason.com has an interesting post up today that provides, if not a full background, at least an interesting connection and a hint. The post -- The First Anti-Ted Kennedy Tea Party: Boston's Anti-Busing Brigades --includes news footage from 1974 of an anti-busing protest in Boston.


These protests were in response to the legal rulings that schools shouldn't be segregated. These are white people angry that they will now have to interact with black people.

They use the tea bag metaphor too.

February 5 Will be George HP Smith Day in Lewes

The City of Lewes has set aside February 5 of each year as "Hon. George H.P. Smith Day." The City Council chose that day to honor our late former Mayor because it is his birthday.

George Smith was our Mayor for many years and he did a great job. I wrote a detailed memorial for the Mayor back in 2005, shorty after he passed away. I stand by what I wrote then; he was a fine man.

This year on the 5th, current Mayor Jim Ford will dedicate a marker honoring Mayor Smith at a tree planted in his memory at Smith Park. His family will launch an annual appeal for contributions to a scholarship fund in his name, and Grotto Pizza will donate a portion of its proceeds on February 4 to the fund. (it's a shame I don't care for Grotto's pizza)

I think this is a good idea.

Happy (Belated) Birthday, Dr. M.L. King

Unstable isotope has posted the full text of the speech at Delaware Liberal. So, naturally, I plugged that into wordle to create a word cloud of the speech.

From My Bucket List?

I had my picture taken with The Count, from Sesame Street, today. I was very excited about this.

I didn't realize that I wanted this until earlier in the week, when I looked at the media advisory from the US Census Bureau about the Census in Schools event I was planning to attend.

Right there, listed along with the Governor, a Senator, and the Director of the Census, were The Count and Rosita!

The Count was there for the students at Bancroft Elementary and a demonstration of the educational materials about the Census that the Bureau is making available to schools nationwide.

But I did get to pose for a picture after the lesson. Great fun!

Though when you compare this picture of me with the picture of my Grandfather at about the same age that I posted earlier this week, it makes you wonder about my level of dignity.

It Seems Possible That I Could Look Dignified

My brother John has turned up a small collection of pictures of our grandfather in the online collection of the Library of Congress.

Our father's father, Charles Delahunt Mahaffie Sr., was a member of the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) from 1930 to 1955 (he was appointed by President Hoover). At some point during that time, I believe, he sat for this portrait. I think he would have been in his late forties or in  his fifties here.

He's very dignified in this photo, and in all others that I've seen. Perhaps there's hope for me?

Of course, my grandfather was a really remarkable man. He was born in 1884 in Olathe Kansas, but moved to Oklahoma as a homesteader as a boy. He graduated from Kingfisher College in 1905 and went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. After practicing law for a few years, he came to Washington DC and worked for several agencies before becoming an ICC commissioner.

He also married Isabel Ruth Cooper and fathered my Dad, for which I am most grateful.

It Takes Me Back, What Can I Say?

I've been enjoying the new Pearl Jam song, Just Breathe, lately. It is a great song in and of itself, but it has been plucking a memory chord for me as well.


Listen to Eddie Vedder's voice here. He has that deep resonant sound to his voice that takes me back to the early 1970s, when I was a kid and my mother brought home an LP by a fellow named Roger Whittaker who has pretty much that same sound.



Of course, there's a fair amount of space between Eddie Vedder and Roger Whittaker. But that new Pearl Jam song really takes me back to when I first heard Roger Whittaker.

Things are About to get Interesting

The new year is about to kick into very high gear for me, professionally. As we rise from the wreckage of the holiday season, a number of strands are starting to come together in the related areas of GIS and data management, the 2010 census, land-use planning, and state government management over-all. It should be an interesting start to 2010.

The Delaware GIS Conference is now one month away. One my my jobs in Delaware state government is the coordination of the use and sharing of geospatial data and tools. I run an organization called the Delaware Geographic Data Committee (DGDC) and we mount a statewide GIS conference every few years.

This time around, I am the chair of the Conference Planning Subcommittee and so am sweating through the run-up and wondering if enough people will register and attend for me to not be terribly embarrassed. Our conference is not expensive, but finding any money to spend these days is a challenge.

I spend a fair amount of time promoting the event. I have initiated a series of posts on the DGDC News blog based on the abstracts of the 24 presentations that will be offered. Meanwhile, I work with a great group of subcommittee members who have all taken on the different tasks needed to make a conference happen. I have absolute faith in these folks, but need to stay connected and try to understand what they are up to to coordinate the whole thing.

Meanwhile, I'm working with another group on a strategic plan for statewide GIS coordination under a federal grant. We plan to release a draft at the GIS Conference, so there's plenty of review and comment work to be done.

And, while we're in coordination mode, the 2010 US Census is just ahead. The decennial count will be taken on April 1 and promoting and preparing for that is part of my job responsibilities.  I'm working now to organize a statewide "Complete Count Committee" to add some oomph to census preparation.

At the same time, I'm deep into the City of Lewes zoning ordinance as chair of the Lewes Planning Commission. We've spent many months on this update and the process has proven more complex and challenging than I would have thought. But we're rounding the final turn and almost ready to take it public.

That task dovetails with the overall land use planning coordination that is the center of the mission of the Office of State Planning Coordination, where I am housed. It is an ongoing challenge for which I provide technical support -- GIS, demographic data, etc. -- and for which I help track news sites and on-line discussion.

Never a dull moment.

And looming over all of this is the return of the Delaware General Assembly on Tuesday. They face another session of trying to balance the state budget in a time of fiscal crisis. There's a chilling story about this in today's News Journal -- Delaware lawmakers return, once again facing tough choices with budget shortfall. It discusses the likelihood that we'll not get back the 2.5% pay cut we took last year. I can live with that. What's more interesting is the start of discussions about what services, programs, offices, and maybe people will need to be cut.

As I said above: "interesting."

Family Pride: My Nephew the Author

There's an interesting-looking interview with one of our nephews in the winter edition of NorEaster, a publication of the North East Anarchist Network.

He has taken on the name Magpie Killjoy for his work as a writer, editor, photographer, designer, musician and activist in the anarchist world. I don't fully understand his politics, but it is fascinating to discuss them with him, read his work, and check out his artistic efforts.

The interview is about his book, Mythmakers & Lawbreakers, which is a collection of interviews with a variety of writers about anarchist themes in fiction and a study of the history of anarchist fiction. It also touches on his history and how he became an anarchist.

For example:

When I was 15 or 16, I thought I was a libertarian. I was dating a communist, and she said, “You know, if libertarians had their way, corporations would run everything.” And I said, “Oh crap, you’re right. But I’m just not a communist. I've never been a communist, I'll never be a communist. Crap.”

I was at a meeting today focused on demographic changes and how they will affect society and government planning (my field). We were talking about the advent of the generations that follow the Baby Boomers. Magpie is part of what we call the Millennial Generation; and I think he is one of the group that is referred to as the Creative Class.

These are young adults who have come of age in a turbulent time. Magpie was in college when 9-11 happened. His generation has a different take on things, but they have a lot to offer us. We just have to do a little learning to really be able to hear them.

2009 Metrics: A Slow Blogging Year

There's no question; 2009 was a slow year for blogging for me. I posted only 142 times during 2009, the lowest annual total in my blogging history.

I averaged just 11.8 posts per month in 2009. The most active month was August, when we traveled to Hawaii and had lots to write about. That month I managed 22 posts. The slowest months were April, October, and December, in which I posted only seven times.

By contrast, my chattiest year was 2005 -- my first full year of blogging -- when I posted 272 times. Looking back at that year, though, I think it is safe to say that many of those posts were short and externally-referenced -- links to other places. This is the sort of thing that I now handle with posts to my Twitter account or to Facebook.

I've started an effort to try to increase my blogging this year, but we'll see.