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Tuesday, August 27, 2002
Latest Trib piece: On TheraDate on the front of today's Tempo: http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/showcase/chi-0208270280aug27.story Here are some comments from Dr. Berscheid that were clipped: If the opposites myth persists, says Berscheid, it’s because people who seem to offset each other actually aren’t that different down deep. "There are exceptions to every rule, and they all stand out and become salient," Berscheid says. "Every time you see an instance of what looks to you as an odd couple, two opposites, then we fish up this idea that opposites attract, but they don't. People may look opposite on the surface, but below the surface, with attitudes, education and so on, they may be very similar." And here's a picky point that Levenson raised--he quoted the divorce rate as 50%. Here's how I worded it, although this was trimmed as well. See if it makes sense: Levenson says opposites actually repel, and that the national divorce rate proves it. (For every two weddings in the United States in the 1990s, there was approximately one divorce, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. While this is often inaccurately calculated as a 50% divorce rate, the number of divorces is still a tiny fraction of the number of existing marriages in the country.) • My Tribune archive • Places&Culture from 
HICKMAN, Ky. — There have been days lately when Mildred Johnson has had to park half a block from her storefront office. The reason, she said, is Kelly Laster. Mr. Laster moved here a year ago from Collinsville, Ill. For $9,000, he bought the old brick building that Citizens Bank abandoned 12 years before and put a pawnshop in it. Two months ago, he opened a doughnut shop next door, so now Ms. Johnson and other people in town have a place to go for lunch. In the bank's mahogany-walled boardroom, now his office, Mr. Laster said, "Next, I'm opening a produce shop." In the fall, he added, "I'm running for mayor." Like roses blooming in graveyards, entrepreneurs have brought new life to some of the comatose old towns along the Mississippi River. Creating new businesses, reinventing old ones, maneuvering around the megastores that sucked away the towns' businesses in the first place, they are resurrecting communities — or at least stalling their demise. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/23/national/23TOWN.html When Ghanaians immigrate here, they quickly display the timeless yearning of new Americans for owning a house. What makes the Ghanaians different is that the house they yearn to own is in Ghana. That explains why an odd business has sprung up on the Grand Concourse, that boulevard of dreams for earlier generations of immigrants. It is called Ghana Homes Inc., and its principal enterprise is helping Ghanaian immigrants, some of them living pinched lives as taxi drivers and nursing home aides, to buy houses in Ghana even if the buyers may never actually return to Ghana to live. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/21/nyregion/21GHAN.html • Previous P&C Monday, August 26, 2002
My last two weeks at the Tribune, and the work is piling up so postings here will temporarily go down. Stay tuned and the quantity, and quality, will hopefully be back to previous respectable levels. For now, enjoy the past couple weeks and my links page. • Etymology Today from M-W: apotheosis \uh-pah-thee-OH-suss or ap-uh-THEE-uh-suss ("th" as in "think")\ 1 : elevation to divine status : deification; 2 : the perfect example : quintessence Among the ancient Greeks, it was sometimes thought fitting -- or simply handy, say if you wanted a god somewhere in your bloodline -- to grant someone or other god status. So they created the word "apotheosis," meaning "making into a god." (The prefix "apo-" can mean simply "quite" or "completely," and "theos" is the Greek word for "god.") There's not a lot of Greek-style apotheosizing in the 21st century, but there is hero-worship. Our extended use of "apotheosis" as "elevation to divine status" is the equivalent of "placement on a very high pedestal." Even more common these days is to use "apotheosis" in reference to a perfect example or ultimate form. For example, one might describe a movie as "the apotheosis of the sci-fi movie genre." • Previous E.T. Morning news from 
Bearing bottled water, cameras, and strollers, about 600,000 people descended yesterday into a cool, subterranean sliver of Boston's future. With the zeal of tourists, they snapped photographs of steel rods and hulking construction equipment, and with the attitude of true Bostonians, they pronounced judgment as soon as they re-emerged into the sunlight: The newly submerged Central Artery is a marvel. When it opens in December, the northbound side of the 11/2-mile-long tunnel will ferry vehicles beneath the streets of downtown Boston and empty them onto the soaring Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge. Offered the chance to walk the route before they drive it, people began lining up at 8:30 a.m. for the noon tour. Massachusetts Turnpike Authority officials had to open the tunnel 40 minutes early to relieve crowding on the streets above. http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/238/metro/People_pace_peek_at_Artery_tunnel+.shtml NAGCHU, Tibet When Chinese officials recently announced the laying of the first tracks in an ambitious railway project to link the restive and long-isolated people of Tibet to the rest of China, they vowed that connecting the world's highest plateau to ''the modern world'' would bring unprecedented economic opportunity. But away from the ears of government officials escorting a group of foreign journalists, Tibetans contended that the $2.4 billion initiative would only draw more Han Chinese residents, the country's dominant ethnic group, who have been migrating steadily to this area over the last decade, bringing with them karaoke bars, discos, and signs in Chinese script that most locals can't understand. ''The train is for them, so the Chinese can come here,'' said a former herder from this northern grassland region through which two-thirds of the roughly 700-mile-long railway will pass. ''They are robbing our land of precious minerals and will use the train to take them away faster. " http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/238/nation/Deemed_a_road_to_ruin+.shtml The number of Americans confined in jails and prisons grew by 1.3 percent last year to reach an unprecedented 1,330,980 inmates, while the total behind bars in Massachusetts remained virtually unchanged, according to state correction officials and figures released yesterday by the US Justice Department. But a closer look at the state numbers yielded little cause for optimism, according to state officials, even though the number of people in Massachusetts prisons and county jails actually dropped 0.1 percent in 2001. As the state's prison population fell 3.1 percent - a figure that looked like good news for a system that lost three lower-security prisons to budget cuts this year and which is currently running 29 percent over capacity - that drop was offset by a jump in the number of people being held in county jails for lesser crimes. http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/238/metro/State_prison_population_static+.shtml Friday, August 23, 2002
Weekend reading: One of the most thoughtful religious blogs I've found is written by Peter Nixon: sursumcorda.blogspot.com. It was covered in the Tribune the same day my blog story ran. Today Nixon links to this story on ex-Catholic Latino Protestants in the Raleigh News-Observer: http://newsobserver.com/features/story/1666310p-1688191c.html I've spotlighted Nixon and a few other quality faith blogs at my slightly updated links page (see bottom). Will takes issue with the Rick Shenkman e-mail at my file site: Thoughts like this, this idea that Americans are credulous and myth-susceptible where other cultures are not, seems to have much currency among today's intelligentsia, albeit latent and not much talked about. I do not deny that Americans love their myths, but neither do I assert that other people don't. ... Peace, prosperity and freedom, many say, are simply Western ideas that don't apply to other cultures. Huh? If there is one thing people everywhere at all times have had in common it is the desire for "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Usually they disagree on who deserves it and how to get it, but the basic principles are the same. There's no point arguing this; it's axiomatic if you know the world beyond your frontdoor. National or regional cultures are merely stories we tell each other to bind ourselves together to pursue our common interests. The baseball strike could silence the legendary voice of Ernie Harwell, says 
Ernie Harwell has no control over baseball's labor problems. Clearly, no one with a lick of sense does. So unless an unprecedented cloud of reason wafts over the owners and players, the Detroit Tigers' season will clank to a premature halt Aug. 30. At their current pace, that could deprive them of 17 additional losses. More important -- at least to many people -- a strike could deprive Harwell of a farewell broadcast. http://www.detnews.com/2002/metro/0208/23/a02-569448.htm An e-mail response at Slate to Virginia Hefferman's review of Sex and the City, which I clipped for my Notebook Reader. Hefferman wrote, "The show's themes now seem less consumerist." I find this quote remarkable, given that season five has been beating us over the head with product tie-ins. To my count, at least three per episode, and that's only counting prominent logo placements accompanied by a few lines of endorsement by the primary characters. I'm giving the producers the benefit of the doubt in assuming references to Vogue magazine, Conde Nast, and popular clubs are not compensated. A major plotline revolved around Charlotte buying a book on Amazon.com that she was too embarrassed to purchase in a store. During one scene, a screenshot of Amazon's website was shown three separate times. It became a two minute commercial on a cable channel we pay $10 per month for. The actual site then had a "Sex in the City" page with book recommendations for viewers. Then there was the scene with Carrie drinking a McDonald's milkshake, carefully held with the logo facing the camera. She happily droned on for 20 seconds about how much she loves McDonald's strawberry shakes. Longtime viewers were amazed that Carrie would be seen in a McDonald's, much less publicly sing its praises. Railroads the route to post-Cold War diplomacy? From 
President Vladimir Putin pressed North Korea on Friday to forge a new Asia-Europe freight route by extending Russia's trans-Siberian railway across the Korean peninsula to bypass China. Putin, speaking after almost four hours of talks with North Korea's reclusive Kim Jong-il, said the new link would help revitalize Russia's depressed and underpopulated far east. The encounter outside the city of Vladivostok comes at an important political juncture with communist North Korea and industrialized South Korea edging closer to each other after almost half a century of icy stand-off. Under Putin, Russia is actively courting Pyongyang after a cool period immediately after the Cold War. The United States, while bracketing North Korea part of an "axis of evil," is keen to reach a deal with Pyongyang to stop it developing nuclear weapons. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A52998-2002Aug23.html What do to with Enron charity donations? ... Hurricane researcher remembers Andrew 10 years later ...and other important but neglected discourse in my Notebook Reader: ...2002_08_18_nbiermafile_archive.html#80622825 • Previous Reader  One week after the 25th anniversary of his death, my Elvis story runs today in the Tribune. Funny how a few minor copy editing moves altered the tone and it doesn’t quite sit well with me. The original is here.
Elvis is one of the few American icons whose death is more meaningfully commemorated than his life, and there’s just an eery—if often tacky—tone surrounding his “posthumous vitality,” as I called it in the article. But before you get too weepy over Elvis’ demise, these little-known-facts fromTrib reporter Rob Elder are a reality check about some of the Elvis mythology. http://metromix.com/top/1,1419,M-Metromix-Home-X!ArticleDetail-17902,00.html Other links: People magazine has a nice little pictorial gallery: http://people.aol.com/people/profiles/photogallery/0,10492,105211,00.html Rolling Stone on the 21st Century marketing of Elvis: http://www.rollingstone.com/features/featuregen.asp?pid=989&cf=2024 NY Times editorial on the 25th anniversary and his cultural legacy: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/16/opinion/16FRI3.html The Atlantic has archived a review of “When Elvis Died” (I think the sub-hed is a misprint here): http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/81jan/demott.htm And finally, in the Tongue-in-Cheek department, did you know Elvis shot JFK? When you think about it, it just makes so much sense. http://www.jokewallpaper.com/elvisshotjfk Footnote to my story: One of the things I was struck by Tuesday night was how Elvis was projected as quintessentially American. In the show, “he” sang, as the original did while alive, “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and wore red, white and blue. He was, of course, spoken of as a hero, an American legend. The show was billed as something of a family fun night, and children gathered around the stage. Ironically, in the 50’s Elvis was an unspeakable rebel, challenging America’s placid mood and ironclad norms. Now he’s seen as a throwback to an innocent time. story link: ...2002_08_18_nbiermafile_archive.html#80615131 • Etymology Today from M-W: babblative \BAB-luh-tiv\ garrulous "Babblative" is a chatty member of the "ative" family, a collection of several hundred English words ending with the Latinate suffix "-ative" (which means "relating to" or "tending to"). "Babblative" appeared in the 1500s, but it wasn't the first word-related member of its clan. "Talkative" has been around since the 15th century. Other verbal family members are more recent, but their heritage is distinguished. "Writative" (meaning "given or addicted to writing") was apparently first used by Alexander Pope in a 1736 letter to Jonathan Swift. (He wrote, "Increase of years makes men more talkative but less writative.") Younger still, "scribblative" (meaning "given to verbose and hastily written writing") was probably coined in 1829 by Robert Southey when he wrote of "professors of the arts babblative and scribblative." • Previous E.T. Thursday, August 22, 2002
• Number of the Day: 5 Percentage below which vacancy rates have fallen in residential space around Ground Zero, down from 45 percent late last year. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/20/nyregion/20HOUS.html • Yesterday's Number Thought of the day: though elitist, a down-to-earth person in high office I wouldn't vote for George W. Bush if he were running against Godzilla, and I still wince while watching his press conferences. Fielding questions yesterday in Crawford, he stuttered and blanked out like a freshman high school debate student, at one point turning to Donald Rumsfeld next to him and asking, "What's the word?" It's embarassing to have him lead the free world. And yet, there's a part of me that appreciates his sincerity--he may be unintelligent and condescendingly vague, but it's impossible for him to actually play a different character as Reagan and Clinton did. They did so much damage to the office of president by turning it into a character to project rather than a person to be. And for his many faults George W. is at least a down-to-earth person in the highest office in the land. No, he doesn't belong there, but there's an authenticity to him that has long disappeared in most career politicians. I imagine you just forget how to be real after awhile. But Bush is sincere. As embarassing as he can be, Bush is at least someone you can watch and say, there's a human being I can relate to--and almost live his incredible story vicariously. It's a sick game, one I deeply hope we as a country end in 2004, but for now, it is at least a change of pace from the smoke-and-mirrors of Reagan and Clinton. • Yesterday's Thought Footnote: Let no one mistake W for a plainfolks everyman, though. This is someone who would be in a sorry state had his name not handed him business and now political power. If he were George W. Smith, you think he'd have a D.C. zip code right now? Greg Budzban, a mathematics professor at the U of Southern Illinois, calls for a pre-emptive fan strike on August 29 in a passionate essay. I don't say this often, but the Trib's Bob Greene says it best: "Millions of Americans will be deeply disappointed, even depressed, if the big-league baseball players DON'T strike." http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/showcase/chi-0208210079aug21.column Do you suppose David Slade has a busy job, or is a latter-day Maytag Repairman? He's the Internship Program Director for the Bill Clinton's Harlem office. You can send in your application by downloading this PDF. • Family&Culture File: Michael Lewis, Slate One of the many surprising things to me about fatherhood is how it has perverted my attitude toward risk. ... My emotions are [now] easily manipulated by cheap dramatic tricks involving the suffering of small children, and by the current media hysteria about what is in fact an ordinary rate of child murders. ... Small children are also a mood-altering substance with financial consequences. Their effect on the human mind is the opposite of Prozac. ... I am no longer as open as I once was to helping out people I don't know, especially when those people need a bath. Several times a week I have a vaguely hostile response to a stranger that I would not have had if I didn't have children—for instance, when I see a bum loitering in the park near our house. http://slate.msn.com//?id=2069348 Ellyn Spragins, NY Times The idea of fathers raising a generation of sons who choose to be stay-at-home dads themselves is a lovely bookend to the long established trend of women entering the work force. But, as we've learned from that, few people can make such an important decision and find it's right for all occasions and all life stages. There's going to be more to this fathering story. So let's not push these men into a new category and call them Mr. Moms. Let's just say they're parents-in-progress, like so many of us. ...2002_08_11_nbiermafile_archive.html#80332086 Timothy Noah, Slate The Times wedding pages are built on the false assumption that the weddings of wealthy non-celebrities constitute news. They're an anachronistic holdover from the days when newspapers carried "society" pages unabashedly celebrating even the most trivial events in the lives of the local (usually WASP) elite. In those distant times, it made a certain amount of sense. For one thing, America did not profess in 1940 to strive for the same degree of egalitarianism that it aspires to today. And on a practical level, newspapers—even the New York Times—were local institutions in communities that really were governed by relatively small, readily identifiable local elites. Today, Times readers and the distribution of economic and political power are more national and diffuse. It's no longer reasonable to assume that most Times readers have the slightest idea who these people celebrated in the wedding pages even are. So why do the wedding pages persist? Not because they convey news, but because the tiny number of people who are wealthy or influential enough to get their weddings written up would have a fit if this privilege were taken away. http://slate.msn.com/?id=2069714 • Yesterday: Places&Culture Wednesday, August 21, 2002
• Number of the Day: 1,500 number of wallets lost annually at Grand Central Station http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/20/nyregion/20LOST.html • Yesterday's Number EU to pry lid off French perfume industry secrets ... Simone star's secret identity... and more in today's installment of my Notebook Reader, a daily roundup of important and/or interesting headline's beneath the radar: ...2002_08_18_nbiermafile_archive.html#80534162 • Yesterday's Reader Bonus thought (boy, is my brain burbling brilliance today...or just wandering uselessly...) A friend who just got a cell phone urged me to call, "especially on nights and weekends!" This idea of financially beneficial times of the day to talk is odd to me: a conversation commenced at 8:59 is costly, at 9:00 it's free. Quantifying speech that way just seems wrong. The thing is, I'm tempted to call people when the clock ticks 9 just to wallow in the vastness (like the woman in the ad who calls her husband's phone just to get him away from the remote). And then I thought, imagine if prayer were said to be best on nights and weekends--would we pray more earnestly or confusedly if there were certain windows of time to talk to God? Thought of the day: change the world? start by making up your mind Each time I concoct an idea to change the world, I'm torn between two impulses--can-do, Think Big ferocity and crippling practical humility. On the one hand, nothing ever changes if everyone wallows in conformity and accepts the world the way it is--it takes courageous, entrepreneurial social attitudes to reduce sexism and inequality in society's institutions, to spread the gospel, to replace business-minded efficiency with intellectual substance in education, the church, the media, society as a whole. (And the above is just half of my to-do list in life...) On the other hand, it is an advanced form of arrogance to think that one flawed mortal out of 6 billion alive and many more dead can actually transform the social environment on the planet, except for micro-settings like my family and office. In my 20s, and inspired by a Kuyperian vision for social change, I lean toward the former: change can happen, I can know what it is, I can write about it and take a tangible step to at least not pollute (if not exactly cleanse) the social atmosphere, and set an example in doing so. But hand-in-hand with Kuyperian quasi-triumphalism is Calvinist absolute depravity, which says that because of every human being's brokenness, I am no more apt to change the world through and for Christ than I am to muck it up with my own selfish pride. I mean, I subscribe to the Downstream model of thinking about social change: you could rescue drowning people as they float by you, but after five people in a row, you'll go upstream to clean the clock of whoever is throwing them in. That's why I see politics as a chance to address problems on a macro-level. BUT power is corrupting, and corridors of power are snakepits of egos. Besides, even if you did have political power to change the world, you'd have to get everyone (or a majority) to AGREE with you. I was thinking about this when I saw that on Sunday, the NY Times Magazine published a cover story on (roughly, though it was decently nuanced) why globalization harms the poor and how it should change. Earlier that week Times resident libertarian columnist Virginia Postrel had written a piece on how Bad Globalization is a myth. So how are we supposed to go out an implement the Mag's 9-point plan if we can't even agree if the diagnosis is apt, let alone the prescription? But is that even the correct model for change--the powerful agree, and it happens? I'd like to read this Malcom Gladwell book, The Tipping Point, which I understand analyzes how major social change happens in small, surprising ways. After all, celebrated, even agreed-upon plans for change can go nowhere, and unexpected ones can flourish. What's a world-changer to do? What do you think? Yesterday's Thought Footnote: This has been my dillemma as an intern at the Tribune: I look around and see things that people who have been here don't see; I envision change, I envision improvement, I envision, all utopian-like, how the Tribune could really transform this metropolis. But not only do I have the least power of anyone in the building to do it, I also have to kiss up and shed my would-be maverick skin in order to come back here some day and actually be in a position to change something, by which time I may lose my fire. The Conformist Insider and the Independently-Minded Outsider...now, to find the middle ground. Last night, covering an Elvis-impersonator concert at Navy Pier, I shook the hand of the man who used to announce "Elvis has left the building"--the King's old tour manager. I believe this may be the most magical celebrity encounter, albeit a little indirect, in my little lifespan. I will be washing the hand, though. Story in the Tribune on Friday. Headlines presented here without comment. It's Make-Your-Own-Sun-Joke Day. An Ohio woman has been jailed for allowing her three children to get severely sunburned at a county fair. The woman, Eve Hibbits, 31, of Brilliant, Ohio, faces three felony counts of endangering her 2-year-old daughter and 10-month-old twin sons. She is scheduled to have a preliminary hearing today. "As soon as I looked at them I could tell," said Sheriff Fred Abdalla of Jefferson County, in eastern Ohio. "It looked like the children had been dipped in red paint. It was 95 degrees, and they were literally baking." http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/21/national/21BURN.html NASA said today that it had found a missing $159 million spacecraft, thanks to a half-dozen telescope images that confirmed that the craft, possibly broken in two, was orbiting the Sun. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/21/science/21SPAC.html Says CNN's Jeff Greenfield in 
In the late summer of 1994, I found myself in the Rose Garden with the president of the United States and two other reporters—part of a Clinton schmoozefest offensive. As the gathering ended, I abandoned my journalistic purity to offer a suggestion about the just-launched Major League Baseball strike. "You know, you might want to look at the Taft-Hartley Act," I said, referring to the 1947 law that gives the president the power to halt some strikes for up to 80 days. "Doesn't this strike affect the national health and safety?" Failing to notice the tongue in my cheek—my own tongue, to be sure—Clinton looked at me as if I had taken complete leave of my senses. Coincidence or not, that was the last time I was invited to any private, semiprivate, or public event with the president. http://slate.msn.com/?id=2069797 • Places&Culture File: The results are in. Walking out of your door is more dangerous in some of Chicago's outer suburbs than in Chicago itself. That conclusion comes from examining two sets of data. First, the study looked at traffic fatalities to assess the danger of leaving home for work or to run an errand or to pick up the kids from a soccer game. Then it looked at homicides by strangers, the murders that strike down people going about their routine business, the murders associated with dangerous neighborhoods. Such homicides account for 20 percent of the total, with the rest occurring between friends, lovers and relatives. ... The results are a testimony to the seeming inability of humans to accurately assess risk. It turns out leaving your door is twice as dangerous in Grundy County as it is in Chicago. (That's 3.3 traffic fatalities and stranger homicides per 10,000 people in Grundy versus 1.4 in Chicago.) ... A similar pattern was found over a four-year period in and around seven other cities: Baltimore, Dallas, Houston, Milwaukee, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/showcase/chi-0208180039aug18.story Two Anne Arundel County police cruisers soon loomed in the rearview mirror. Yet despite his terror, Langston did not panic. Just a few more miles, he knew, and they would reach a place of refuge: a town that black people governed and allowed county police to enter only by invitation. A town where his family and other prominent African Americans owned elegant summer homes and held dinner parties at which piano sonatas were played and politics were discussed. A town beyond racism's reach. Called Highland Beach, it was Maryland's first majority-black municipality, and it is believed to be the nation's oldest African American resort. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37797-2002Aug19.html • Previous P&C Tuesday, August 20, 2002
• Quote of the Day: "I have no problem whatsoever in walking on red carpets, because I've certainly washed enough of them in my life." Benedita da Silva, a former maid who became Rio de Janeiro's first black woman governor http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/17/international/americas/17FPRO.html • Number of the Day: 2.4 Percent of SUV drivers in New York who use cellphones while driving, three times the percentage of car drivers. Overall usage dropped from 2.3 percent to 1.1 percent since a state law banned drivers from using cell phones. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/19/nyregion/19CELL.html • Yesterday's quote, link and number Um, remember the Pentagon? You know, where 184 people, more than the number who died in the Oklahoma City bombing, were killed September 11? It was somewhat forgotten in the shadow of the World Trade Center ruins, and now workers are moving back in to the damaged section. I can't believe how little coverage the Pentagon has gotten compared to Ground Zero, and even this piece is unoriginal, reading like military propaganda until about halfway through: http://www.usatoday.com/news/sept11/2002-08-20-pentagon_x.htm Boom? Bust? Both? Here's why I'm so freaking confused about the economy: two blurbs, both from the front page of USA Today's Money section yesterday: Economic recovery may have 'hit a wall' in July; Chances of a double-dip recession have increased to 20% or more WASHINGTON -- Anxious economists are downgrading their forecasts, and some crucial sectors of the economy are pushing the likelihood of a rebound into next year because of the abrupt slowdown in the economic recovery." Rally extends into 4th week Investors fixated on the chances of a double-dip recession and whether CEOs would sign off on the books may have missed something more important: a rally. Stocks rose for a fourth-consecutive week for the first time since May 2001. Recession? Consumer spending is good, the housing market is booming, and the GDP was up 6.1 percent in the first quarter. This is complicated. Alan Blinder, formerly of the Federal Reserve and now economics professor at Princeton, wrote last month in the NY Times: Those who get their economic news from television may come away with the impression that the economy and the stock market are two sides of the same coin. If the market is heading south, then the economy must be, too. But it's not true. The United States economy is most emphatically not falling right now. The stock market may be the TV star. But it is the economy that generates the jobs and puts the food on our tables. And fortunately, the economy is doing much better than the market. It's confusing, so the media focuses on "national mood" news about the economy that oversimplifies things, said Wall St. bigwig Holman W. Jenkins Jr. last month at Slate: Thank you for not using the words "restore investor confidence." Have you noticed how almost every solution touted by everybody sounds like it's meant to jolly up investors so they start throwing money at stocks again? I swear if you read Hank Paulson's speech or listen to anything Harvey Pitt says, it seems as if they think the best reform is one that serves its psychological purpose without changing anything substantively. http://slate.msn.com/?id=2067448&&entry=2067602 My advice is to read the rest of Blinder's breakdown for an accessible explanation of where we stand. ...2002_08_18_nbiermafile_archive.html#80488773 Notebook Reader is back, after a hiatus, of which there might be more thanks to my schedule over the next few weeks. Anyway, women gaining ground in governor's races and other important discourse below the media's hype radar in today's edition: ...2002_08_18_nbiermafile_archive.html#80488395 Previous Reader Thought of the Day: would we be better of if everyone went to college? Of course we would. And yet ... As I was chewing on this NYT piece and this e-mail from the prof who runs the History News Network, I started thinking about some of the contrarian talking points. I believe it was Ellul who said the problem with higher education is that rather than creating the most well-adjusted citizens, it can become a detached elitist left-wing subculture. Indeed, if you're interested in the most extreme left-wing groups, look at the student organization bulletin board at a college campus, not the lunchroom at the factory or other places the educated look down their noses at. College faculties are collections of 60s holdovers, often liberal with blinders. As a liberal myself, I'm not completely disappointed by this, and I'm grateful to my college for taking me beyond simple-minded conservatism. But at mainstream state colleges and universities across the nation, students are gettting their supposed wisdom filtered through very narrow channels. We'd have at least two other major problems if everyone went to college. First, alcoholism would go up, as America's otherwise potentially useful underclassmen would continue to drink themselves stupid every weekend. This is enlightenment? It's bacchanalia behind the ivy. And then there's the mind-numbing success narrative--many colleges breed in students the belief that people are there just to sit, take notes and tests, receive a formal-looking piece of paper, for the sole purpose of getting a high-paying job. Fewer schools inspire students to love learning more than money, to be promiscuously curious about the world, to become not just a learned but a perpetually learning adult, interested in the fullness of life. Sometimes I wonder if you learn the most, and the best, outside the classroom. That's why I'm shelving my graduate school plans for the time being to be a journalist, where I get to actually go out and see the world and talk to people, rather than just read about it in a dorm room or library. What do you think? Previous Thought • Money&Culture from this morning's newsstand: "Boom shared by all races in Chicago" Chicago Sun-Times front page headline, August 20 "Rich 90s failed to lift all: Income disparity between races widened greatly, census analysis shows" Chicago Tribune front page headline, August 20 Actually, both are right. As the Trib says: "The good news: Poverty and unemployment among all racial and ethnic groups fell in the city and region as a whole, although this data was collected before the current economic downturn. Nevertheless, in Chicago, nearly 30 percent of blacks, 20 percent of Latinos and nearly 18 percent of Asians lived in poverty in 1999. That's compared with just 8.2 percent of whites who reported incomes below the poverty line." • Income-by-neighborhood census chart • Etymology Today from M-W: ambrosia \am-BROH-zhuh or am-BROH-zhee-uh\ *1 a : the food of the Greek and Roman gods b : the ointment or perfume of the gods 2 : something extremely pleasing to taste or smell 3 : a dessert made of oranges and shredded coconut "Ambrosia" literally means "immortality" in Greek; it is derived from the Greek word "ambrotos," meaning "immortal," which combines the prefix "a-" (meaning "not") with "-mbrotos" (meaning "mortal"). In Greek and Roman mythology, only the immortals -- gods and goddesses -- could eat ambrosia. Those mythological gods and goddesses also drank "nectar," the original sense of which refers to the "drink of the gods." "Nectar" (in Greek, "nektar") may have implied immortality as well, as it probably translates literally as "overcoming death." (Even today, you'll often find the words "ambrosia" and "nectar" in each other's company.) While the "ambrosia" of the gods offered immortality, we mere mortals use "ambrosia" in reference to things that just taste or smell especially delicious. Previous E.T. Monday, August 19, 2002
• Link of the Day: www.politicalpredictions.org "Holding unsuspecting media types accountable for their oracular pronouncements." Lists bold and often unfounded predictions by pundits for the purpose of public ridicule. • Quote of the Day: "My favorite part is just seeing those monstrous jets roaring with their thrusters. It's just a nice family thing." Gary Solomon III, Chicago resident attending the city's Air and Water Show. How exactly do those two things go together? http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/showcase/chi-0208190200aug19.story • Number of the Day: 17: Percent increase in free trips claimed by frequent fliers in the last 12 months, adding to the airline industry's headaches. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/17/business/17MILE.html Recycled Thought of the Day: One of my college mentors, Bill Romanowski, adds helpfully to my thought here and article elsewhere on the American view of morality It's what I call the Wizard of Oz syndrome. Dorothy and her friends have within themselves everything they need to secure their own destiny and salvation, and their journey helps them realize that. As Christians we realize we don't do it on our own. We need God. It's a very different way of looking at the world. Even evangelical Christians sometimes trip up on this and frame personal salvation as an Oprah-style improvement exercise. Romanowski's fascinating book has won the Gold Medallion from the Christian Publishers Association, a well-deserved honor from an unlikely source. Calvin College news release: http://www.calvin.edu/news/releases/2002_03/romo_award.htm • History&Today It's the 25th anniversary of the death of Groucho Marx: http://www.usatoday.com/usatonline/20020819/4371184s.htm • Blog Watch: The latest blog headlines being linked around lately...more at my Blogathon page. How could a tech-savvy paper like the San Jose Mercury-News write a intro-to-blogs story so late in the game? http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/3883026.htm Newsweek also tries to keep up: http://www.msnbc.com/news/795156.asp On file: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/05/books/review/05SHULEVT.html http://www.epnworld-reporter.com/news/fullstory.php/aid/229/Top_Journalist_Weblogs.html A journalist's view from Pakistan: http://www.petermaass.com/weblog/ Somewhat related: The NYT says college papers are much more popular on dead trees than online: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/19/technology/19PAPE.html?todaysheadlines It's good, but unlikely, to see the staid old NY Times continue to try to prove its progressive mettle by deciding to list same-sex unions in its Weddings pages. 'We recognize society remains divided about the legal and religious definition of marriage,'' says editor Howell Raines, but "we acknowledge the newsworthiness of a growing and visible trend in society toward public celebrations of commitment by gay and lesbian couples ... The Styles pages will treat same sex celebrations as a discrete phenomenon meriting coverage in their own right.'' NYT-owned Boston Globe will mull this over: http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/230/nation/N_Y_Times_to_print_same_sex_unions-.shtml Latest Trib piece: another of my valuable contributions to major public discourse: How To Waste Time: http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/showcase/chi-0208190164aug19.story more of my Trib articles E-mails Eric Zorn: "Only one time in the nearly 20 years that the Tribune has been electronically archived has any writer touched on the question of what the Q in Q-Tip might stand for. Today, however, it happened twice..." That was in my story and in Dawn Turner Trice's column, "Caring teacher left lasting mark on 1st graders." "I had watched the way he listened intently to enthusiastic and wide-eyed students who always had something important to say or ask, like: "Tell me again, when is `Y' a vowel?" and "Do you know what the `Q' in Q-Tip stands for?" The only other citing was a Tribune Magazine report ten years ago on an author of a book of little-known facts. So I helped made history. My epitaph is nearly complete. • Etymology Today from M-W: canard \kuh-NARD\ 1 : a false or unfounded report or story; especially: a fabricated report 2 : an airplane with horizontal stabilizing and control surfaces in front of supporting surfaces; also : a small airfoil in front of the wing of an aircraft that increases the aircraft's stability The French had an old saying (going back to Middle French), "vendre des canards a moitie," literally, "to half-sell ducks." It meant "to fool" or "to cheat." That expression led to the use of "canard," the French word for "duck," to mean "a hoax" or "a fabrication." English speakers adopted this "canard" in the mid-1800s. The aeronautical sense of "canard," used from the early days of flying, comes from the stubby duck-like appearance of the aircraft. "Canard" can even mean simply "duck" in English as well, but this use is limited to the specialized realm of cooking. The French word itself is ultimately derived from "caner," Old French for "cackle," a word of imitative origin. Previous E.T. • Places&Culture from
LAKE LOUISE VILLAGE, Alberta, Aug. 13 — It is the most famous picture postcard image of Canada's Rocky Mountain splendor: lovely Lake Louise shimmering under the giant Victoria glacier and surrounded by a dense forest of spruce and fir trees. Normally, the only interruption to the tranquillity is the occasional thunderous clap of ice breaking off the glacier, bringing cries of glee from tourists paddling canoes below. But the emerald lake in Banff National Park has become a battleground between a large Canadian hotel chain and environmentalists who say they must make a stand here to save the country's 39 national parks from developers http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/14/international/americas/14CANA.html The only sound in this flat green settlement on the Mississippi River is the whisper of leaves. Just off the Grande Rue, at a shrine beside the abandoned rectory of the gothic brick Immaculate Conception Church, visitors press a green button on a wall to look inside. An automated door swings open to reveal a view of the Liberty Bell of the West. No one is in there. No one seems left in Kaskaskia, the first capital of the state of Illinois, from 1818 to 1820. The bell, 11 years older than the one in Philadelphia and almost as large, was King Louis XV's gift to French settlers here. More than 2,000 people lived here once. But the Census Bureau found only 9 in 2000, down from 32 in 1990. Flood upon flood, most recently the Great Flood of 1993, have left Kaskaskia an island with more egrets than people. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/16/national/16GHOS.html Everywhere you turn on Washington's fashionable Embassy Row, a new palace-size building is under construction, a testament to the frenzied competition of other nations to gain attention in the capital of the last remaining superpower. More than a dozen countries have built or are in the midst of building embassies the size of castles. They come adorned with faux towers and real waterfalls in what one diplomat called "neo-this and made-up-that architecture." From these castle-bastions, foreign diplomats conduct what they call the new Washington diplomacy, an explosion of events geared to reaching the broadest possible audience in hopes of being heard above the din of other countries competing for the same elusive prize of influence. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/17/international/17EMBA.html Previous P&C Friday, August 16, 2002
• Quote of the Day: "The hinge of a door is never crowded with insects." Chinese proverb • Link of the Day: www.phonespell.org What does your phone number spell? I entered mine and it said it doesn't spell anything. I was strangely disappointed. • Number of the Day: 4 Rank of Canada, up from 9 one year ago, among 14 countries as a response to this Harris Poll question: "If you could spend a vacation in any country in the world, outside the United States, and you would not have to worry about the cost, what one country would you choose?" http://www.pollingreport.com/places.htm#Foreign Letter from an ex-dot-commer: Today is my last day at a web design company I’ve worked for since August 1999. In the span of three years, I have: survived 13 rounds of lay-offs; moved offices twice; sat in five different cubicles; received three complimentary massages; drank, approximately, 732 free beverages, mostly seltzer; reported to four different supervisors, bosses, or mentors; received one promotion, two department changes, and a raise; been paid twice what my mother earns as a teacher, and made more than three times what my father was paid at my age, with child; sat frozen at my desk by a large window overlooking Park Avenue, unable to move even my fingers, in complete panic and fear, having no idea what was happening or why; watched a friend vomit outside our office once the leftover IPO champagne was finished after-hours; complained about my boss in front of her husband, the CEO, who generously gave me a job in the first place and then, wracked by guilt and shamed, approached him and apologized, nearly freaking out, explaining the whole thing and about to cry and then a little startled, even more ashamed when he laughed, patted my shoulder, and explained he hadn’t heard a thing but ‘it didn’t really matter anyway’... And it goes on like this! http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/letters/rosecrans/quitter.shtml • History&Today: On the 945th anniversary of Macbeth's death, it's worth revisiting a defense of the real-life namesake of Shakespeare's play, says 
"The real Macbeth, it seems, was Lord of Moray in the 11th century and was, by the standards of the time, a decent and an honourable man," wrote Brendan McWilliam in The Irish Times in 1995. "He legitimately succeeded Duncan I as king of Scotland -- not by stabbing the latter as he slept, but after killing him in battle in a fair fight. Moreover, Macbeth's 17-year reign was genial and a prosperous time for Scotland and came to an end . . . when Duncan's son Malcolm assassinated poor Macbeth at Dunsinane near Perth." Who knew? They're practicing for tomorrow's air show here on the lakeshore, and it's scaring the $*&! out of me. If you don't know there's an air show on, you'd think it's the second coming of September 11 in the Loop, as planes streak over skyscrapers and drown out conversations. It took me three or four flyovers before I stopped being startled. One liberal and one conservative rant for today: From yesterday, Mickey Kaus deconstructs a NY Times series slanted to scare people about child welfare. http://slate.msn.com/?id=2069339&#scare From my file, Molly Ivins bashes simple-mindedness on school prayer: We had one of those "What was he thinking?" moments with Gov. Rick (Goodhair) Perry the other day. The only governor we've got decided to bring back that old bone of contention: prayer in the schools. Nice timing, guv.The very first clause in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution establishes freedom of conscience. The majority does not rule anyone's faith. If we wanted the state to coerce faith, we would have voted for the Taliban. Look, as we all know, the religious majority in Texas is hardshell Southern Baptist. Splendid people, the Southern Baptists, but the fact is, if the rest of us had wanted to join their church, we would have done so. Our next biggest faith is Catholicism, and if the governor wants to spend the rest of his term convincing Baptists to say "Hail Mary," that's fine by me. As is obvious to all but those of the most limited intelligence and the governor, by the time you get the Catholics, Jews, Episcopalians, Methodists, Muslims, atheists, agnostics, Church of Christers, Buddhists, Sikhs, New Agers and the County Line Salt of the Earth Church of the Predestinarian Faith to sign off on one prayer, it begins "To Whom It May Concern, If There Is a Whom." Prayer in school is quite perfectly legal, and is especially common before algebra exams. Mandatory prayer organized by, led by and broadcast over the public address system by paid agents of the state is unconstitutional.Matthew 6: 5 and 6. WILL HAS A WEBLOG: http://refvem.blogspot.com/ Bring your thinking caps. I met Will in a class at Calvin. It is hard work for him to be boring--he is so well-read and well-spoken that he intriguingly tackles philosophy, religion, literature, and a little of everything else in his thinking, and now in his weblog. I'll bookmark it to the left. In an e-mail, he says in a few words what I was trying to say in many more: "I love the liturgy because it reminds me of who God is, not who I am, which is all contemporary services do for me." I'll let that be today's Thought of the Day. Important follow-up to my breakdown of personal media and public responsibility--this provocative memo about writing vs. reporting from the Arizona Republic. "We have to get reporters away from the mistaken notion that we are writers first and reporters second. ... We are not about writing. We are about getting facts and telling people about them." Recipe for boredom and irrelevance right there. Although I'm sympathetic to the problem of lazy reporting, I think bad writing is actually one of the top three problems in media. I've rebutted this the way I want to in my earlier rant, and I'll again link to this fabulous Wash. Monthly symposium on objectivity: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/1999/9901.symposium.html The Phoenix New Times, which posted the memo, spoofs the Republic in this PDF. Good for some chuckles.  Architecture Watch: Manhattan's Citicorp Center gets a sturdier leg. Roughly the 24th anniversary of the quiet panic surrounding the realization that the building was in grave danger of being toppled by an approaching hurricane, which prompted welders to stiffen in clandestinely during the night. Here's yesterdays NY Times article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/15/nyregion/15TOWE.html And the website for PBS' documentary that featured the bizarre '78 episode: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/buildingbig/wonder/structure/citicorp.html My pictures of the building last summer: http://nbierma-ny.freeservers.com/pictures/citicorp.html Previous Architecture Watch • Word of the Day from M-W: tatterdemalion \tat-er-dih-MAIL-yun\ 1 *a : ragged or disreputable in appearance b : being in a decayed state or condition : dilapidated 2 : beggarly, disreputable The exact origin of "tatterdemalion" is uncertain, but it's probably connected somehow to either the noun "tatter" ("a torn scrap or shred") or the adjective "tattered" ("ragged" or "wearing ragged clothes"). We do know that "tatterdemalion" has been used in print since the 1600s. In its first documented use in 1611, it was used as a noun (as it still can be) in reference to a person in ragged clothing -- the type we might also call a ragamuffin. ("Ragamuffin," incidentally, predates "tatterdemalion" in this sense. Like "tatterdemalion," it may have been formed by combining a known word, "rag," with a fanciful ending.) Within three years of the first appearance of "tatterdemalion," it came to be used as an adjective for anything or anyone ragged or disreputable. Never mind, someone stole my pool car. So... Thoughts&Culture from
Anyone who doesn't recognize the power of "post" in intellectual strategy just hasn't been watching. It can gel loosely related phenomena into a major intellectual movement or cultural vanguard without having to be very precise about what unites them or what they are rather than what they are not. Postmodernism is the reigning example. ... Those who study, articulate or propound the beliefs and practices by which most of humanity tries to place itself in relationship with the transcendent should post themselves. They should simply drop that old-fashioned word "religion." What they are about, they should announce, is "postsecularism." http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/03/national/03BELI.html Thursday, August 15, 2002
• Quote of the Day: "Preach the Gospel at all times. If necessary, use words." St. Francis of Assisi The slow but necessary death of the college lecture, "that mysterious process by means of which the contents of the professor's notebooks are transferred by means of the fountain pen to the pages of the student's notebook without passing through the mind of either," from
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/14/education/14LES.html  Vanilla Coke is off to a good start, says Time. Unlike New Coke, and Pepsi's latest creation, Pepsi Blue, which tastes and looks like Windex, Vanilla Coke actually tastes good.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101020812-333893,00.html Thought of the day: time and worship "I like connecting to something older." I think those were the exact words of my friend yesterday on the topic of church worship. We each attend Fourth Presbyterian here in Chicago and appreciate the formality, the beauty of the cathedral, the interesting preaching and intellectual engagement. His quote may seem a fogey-ish statement for two men under 40 to endorse, but we both have our problems with the Overhead Projector Revolution in churches over the past two decades--play the drums, make some noise, flash the words onto the overhead, and POOF! you have Instant Relevant Worship (TM). It's emotional, it's engaging, but it's also fleeting, here one moment and gone the next--just another momentary flash pulsating at us in our modern MTV culture. It doesn't feel connected to anything that came before it, nor, like my friend said, does it often have clear theological roots, which may make you roll your eyes but can anchor and sustain the experience of worship. Connecting to something older. We seem to have dwindling opportunities to do so today. Touring historic sites, voting, celebrating Christmas--these rituals place us in time, in the context of something larger, tying us to other human experiences beside our own. In an MTV world there are no such ties, little context, little that is larger than yourself except for the projections of performers before you. So each Sunday I like to sit in church, try to take it all in, let my eyes leap to the grand arches of the building around me, sing or recite familiar words, participate in the ongoing story and fellowship of the Church, and feel my soul come out of its media-battered shell during a rare hour of actual peace and renewal. Previous Thought • Word of the Day from M-W: purfle \PER-ful\ to ornament the border or edges of Today we use "purfle" mostly in reference to setting a decorative inlaid border around the body of a guitar or violin, a process known as "purfling." In the past, "purfle" got the most use in connection with adornment of garments. "The Bishop of Ely . . . wore a robe of scarlet . . . purfled with minever," reported an English clergyman in 1840, for example. We embellished our language with "purfle," first as "purfilen" in the 1300s, when we took it with its meaning from Middle French "porfiler." Related to "purfle" is "filigree," which is used as a noun for ornamental work made of fine wire, and also as a verb meaning "to adorn with filigree." "Purfle" and "filigree" share the Latin source "filum," which means "thread." • Money&Culture File Now is the time that gold—solid, immutable, real—should be rocketing toward $800 per ounce, yet the yellow metal has confounded its long-suffering devotees by remaining tethered to the $300-per-ounce level, where it has been stuck for years. Either things are not as bad as they seem, or gold may finally be losing its ancient status as the investment of last resort. "About time," mutters the ghost of John Maynard Keynes, who long ago pronounced gold "a barbarous relic." http://slate.msn.com//?id=2069302 Deep in the pine forest of the Russian north, a battle is being fought over the shape of a Russian economy increasingly concentrated in the hands of just a few tycoons. ... The scene is more than just a fine piece of Russian corporate theater. These are the front lines of a phenomenon that has transformed the economy in the last three years. A handful of large business groups have been moving through systematically, buying up entire industries. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/13/international/europe/13RUSS.html Wednesday, August 14, 2002
Consumer Reports does the math on book buying and other essentials in its back-to-school guide. Wait a minute, when did DVD's become must-haves for schoolgoers? Heck, in grade school I was glad to get colored pencils. http://www.consumerreports.com Chicago Architecture Watch: 311 S. Wacker changes hands: http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/showcase/chi-0208100147aug10.story A related thought to below: I've noticed a couple of examples of so-called gentlemen's agreements lately--there was the case of the out-of-town Broadway review and talk show bookings. I was just thinking, isn't the term "gentleman's agreement" very British, very deferential, and in the light of my rant below, very un-American? But again, we value these things to keep society ticking. Thought of the Day: the tension between democracy and power. America was founded as the anti-Britain, rejecting hierarchy and elitism in favor of democratic ideals. That was the idea anyway (see the Dec. of Independence). It was part ideology, part geography--the new continent had so much more land mass that the equation of land ownership with power no longer made sense: there was enough breathing room for anybody to be anyone they wanted, own as much land as they wanted, and escape from the tight, stuffy social hierarchy of Britain. Hierarchy works better on a small continent than in an vast, untamed new wilderness. Then again, no one was stuffier or more elite than the Founding Fathers--a well-educated, aristocratic breed who valued deference, looked down upon women, and calculated slaves to be 3/5 of of a person. Egalitarian these guys were not. Since then our economic ideals have always seemed to clash with our democratic ones--we don't really want egalitarianism--anyone being just as important, having just as much power, as anyone else--we just vaguely think we sort of want it. Otherwise we wouldn't so laud the powerful and envy the rich. Otherwise we wouldn't view the poor as an undeserving, underachieving lot that just has to work hard, the American way, in order to prosper (I would submit most of the poor are hard-working, and most of the rich are not and some of them never were). I was re-reading Anna Deavere Smith's Talk to Me and came across this quote from Hayden White, professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz: The assumption is that the free market and democracy go hand in hand. If you buy into the free market, you have to take a certain amount of unemployment, a certain amount of exploitation, a certain amount of corruption, and so forth. It has nothing to do with democracy. ...That's been the greatest triumph of Western capitalism, to identify democracy with the free market. Insert Enron rant here. Now, of course our economic mechanisms look good compared to the tyranny of Communist and dictator states, and I don't want to downplay that. I'm just saying that I think we value power more than democracy would suggest we would: if we really believed "all men [sic] are created equal," we wouldn't willingly play politics so much in our workplaces, our homes, our churches, heck, our softball leagues. We value seniority, putting in your dues. I was comiserating with a reporter here at the Tribune about how the mentality is that you graduate to the Tribune from other places, not necessarily that you are a better writer than someone with less newspaper experience, which some major newspaper reporters indeed are not. Then I was thinking about this scenefrom Mr. Holland's Opus the other night where Mr. Holland is waiting in the lunch line in his first day of school, and the football coach comes along and tells him to move to the front of the line: teachers don't wait with the students. "High school is not a democracy," the coach says. We value these imbalances in power, however small a scale they may be on. We function according to seniority, putting in your dues, earning it. Sometimes that has little or nothing to do with equality. Previous Thought Footnote:This tension between equality and elitism has throbbed through American political thought. Walter Lippman was one of the great American journalists, and yet he believed news should come from an oligarchy of elite journalists--ministers of culture. As I wrote before, do we really want everyone to vote? Similarly, look at Argentina--this creep is democratically elected, and the U.S. supports a coup that removes him (he's back now). We're saying, we, an elite few, know better than the masses--there is no inherent wisdom in democratic decisions (as I believe Tocqueville put it: the tyranny of the majority). • Word of the Day from M-W: perpend \per-PEND\ 1 : to reflect on carefully : ponder; 2 : to be attentive : reflect "Perpend" isn't used often these days, but when it does show up it is frequently imperative. As such, its use can be compared to the phrase "mark my words." "Perpend" arrived in English in the 15th century from the Latin verb "perpendere," which in turn comes from "pendere," meaning "to weigh." Appropriately, our English word essentially means "to weigh carefully in the mind." "Pendere" has several descendants in English, including "append," "compendium," "expend," and "suspend." "Perpend" can also be a noun meaning "a brick or large stone reaching through a wall" or "a wall built of such stones," but that "perpend" comes from a Middle French source and is unrelated to the verb. • Places&Culture from
"Last year we did only 50 roof gardens. So far this year we have already had 200 orders." The realization that Tokyo is becoming a vast "heat island" is behind the boom in roof gardens. Here, centuries of gradual climate change are telescoping into decades. "Over the last century, Tokyo temperatures have increased five times as fast as global warming," said Takehiro Mikami, a professor of climatology at Tokyo Metropolitan University. While the world's average mean temperature has increased by one degree Fahrenheit since 1900, Tokyo's has increased by 5.2 degrees. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/13/international/asia/13TOKY.html Avenir P. Ovsyanov was only 20 but can still recount in exacting detail how in 1957 he helped destroy this city's German soul.Following orders from local Soviet bosses, Mr. Ovsyanov's military engineering class bored hundreds of holes in the ruins of the city's 13th-century castle, packed them with dynamite and began blasting away 700 years of history. It is perhaps a fitting twist of fate that now, as director of the region's historical preservation department, Mr. Ovsyanov's job is to protect — or recover, as is more often the case — the art, culture and history lost first by war and then by Soviet rule. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/13/international/europe/13KALI.html The Harlem Little League was founded in 1989 by Dwight and Iris Raiford at the urging of their son Joshua, who was 9. They struck a deal; if he agreed to take piano lessons, they would start a Little League program in Harlem. The league's early fields had broken glass, discarded crack vials and tire ruts. But the Raifords and other volunteers worked to make the fields safe places to play, and the league has grown from 129 players in its first year to nearly 700 now. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/14/sports/baseball/14LITT.html (log in with member name and password of "nbiermaread") Tuesday, August 13, 2002
• Quote of the Day: "Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia." Charles Schultz • Link of the Day: www.crazythoughts.com Imponderables include: If they develop a supersonic train, will they give it a whistle? Do fish ever get thirsty? What happened to the first 6 ups? If you keep trying to prove Murphy's Law, will something keep going wrong? Meager offerings here today, I know (in quantity but not quality!). I've been busy polishing a piece for the Trib. Thought of the Day, Notebook Reader and other favorites return tomorrow. No, there aren't any pirates in Pittsburgh, says Answer Guy in 
http://msn.espn.go.com/magazine/vol5no17answerguy.html  It's true, says the stellar urban legends site Snopes.com: this Billy Ripken card contains an obscenity:
http://www.snopes.com/business/hidden/ripken.htm It's a movie kind of day (see below...): Saw A Few Good Men recently, with one of the all-time well-acted scenes with Jack Nicholson in the courtroom at the end. Worth reading in this script I found: http://www.godamongdirectors.com/scripts/fewgood.shtml Watched Mr. Holland's Opus with my wife last night--one of the richest movies to have such a low ratio of action-per-minute. But very meaningful, especially for this soul-searching college grad. I thought Jay Thomas looked familiar, playing the football coach, but I haven't seen anything IMDB says he's been in. Which includes Who Wants To Marry a Multi-Millionaire, that creepy Fox-ploitation nightmare he hosted a couple years ago. What kind of measure of your career is it to say you've been in Mr. Holland's Opus and Who Wants To Marry a Multi-Millionaire? Is that supposed to be versatility? Word of the Day from M-W: palmary \PAL-muh-ree or PAHL-muh-ree\ outstanding, best English speakers have been using "palmary" since the 1600s, and its history stretches back even further than that. It was the ancient Romans who first used their "palmarius" to describe someone or something extraordinary. "Palmarius" literally translates as "deserving the palm." But what does that mean exactly? Was it inspired by palms of hands coming together in applause? That would be a good guess, but the direct inspiration for "palmarius" was the palm leaf given to a victor in a sports competition. That other palm, the one on the hand, is loosely related. The Romans thought the palm tree's leaves resembled an outstretched palm of the hand; they thus used their word "palma" for both meanings, just as we do with "palm" in English.  A scientific breakdown of Signs from 
• In 1991, British artists Doug Bower and Dave Chorley confessed to having created the [crop circles] that started the craze, and several Web sites now provide detailed instructions on how to make your own. • Let's consider why man-eating is an unlikely motivation. First, our proteins and fats and nucleic acids almost certainly would not agree with an independently evolved alien digestive system. Second, any civilization that can travel between the stars necessarily has access to tremendous reserves of energy and materials. Finding a snack is not going to be a problem. And even if terrestrial flesh were a unique taste treat, wouldn't cows make a better choice? They have a lot more meat and put up less of a fight. • A civilization that can travel through light years of empty space probably would not need to send scouts onto the ground to find conveniently located farms and then knock down their corn. http://www.discover.com/science_news/features/gthere.html?article=feat_signs.html Monday, August 12, 2002
• Link of the Day: www.coolsig.com You know those pithy quotes and funny quips people insert after their e-mail signatures? The best are collected here. • Number of the Day: 27: Percent of male drinkers who have at least one drink a day, compared with 10% of female drinkers. http://www.gallup.com/poll/releases/pr020809.asp Less than a month until the first anniversary of September 11, so it's as good a time as any for a couple of reality checks to keep it in perspective. This is not to deman the horror and suffering of the attacks, only to go beyond the simplification of the mainstream media. First of all, more Americans die from food poisoning each year than died in the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks (the Centers for Disease Control estimates 5,000 Americans die of food poisoning each year). About 40,000 Americans die of gunfire each year, while slightly more die of Alzheimers. Almost 100,000 Americans per year die in accidents, while over 700,000 die of heart disease. In other words, far more Americans die at each other's hands (thanks to guns or drunk driving) or of disease than are killed by al-Qaeda. And yet the constant stream of headlines each morning suggests that terrorists are the primary threat to our existence and happiness. CDC stats: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/lcod.htm I e-mailed Rick Shenkman, a history professor at George Mason University who runs the left-leaning History News Network, and asked him what he thought was the greatest myth about September 11. Here's his thorough answer. ...2002_08_11_nbiermafile_archive.html#80146941 From Chimes: Sept. 11 not a turning point. Thought of the Day: when to go to war? Right now there's so much talk in the media about whether and when we're going to attack Iraq that Saddam Hussein may as well fire all his spies and get a subscription to The Washington Post. What was raised in a story meeting here this morning is, What is the tipping point that makes us go to war? What makes it OK, when is it agreed to be necessary, when do all but the pacifists (a noble breed, it should be noted) quiet down and march or cheer? The question is made all the more poignant by a stellar Time magazine cover piece on the pre-9/11 plans to attack al-Qaeda. Throughout, it seems leaders pocketed the plans as an effect of 1) labyrinthine Washington bureacracy and 2) the paralysis of public opinion--the country wouldn't have supported the messy business without more palpable cause, which September 11 horrifyingly provided. Back to Iraq, which seems to have nothing to do with September 11 but is now public enemy number one. If we don't attack them and they nuke us or someone we like, will we have numerous more magazine stories on What We Should Have Done and Donald Rumsfeld wearing a T-shirt to press conferences that says I Told You So? On the other hand, if we go in there tomorrow, will we be just as predictably subjected to the scores of naysayers, the Congressional opponents sounding righteous and snide about a president's supposed hubris? The Gulf War introduced a war fought on TV. This possible round two may be the first one planned on TV. http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101020812/story.html Previous Thought Word of the Day from M-W: oneiric \oh-NYE-rik\ of or relating to dreams, dreamy The notion of using the Greek noun "oneiros" (meaning "dream") to form the English adjective "oneiric" wasn't dreamed up until the mid-19th century. But back in the early 1600s, linguistic dreamers came up with a few "oneiros" spin-offs, giving English "oneirocriticism," "oneirocritical," and "oneirocritic" (each referring to dream interpreters or interpretation). The surge in "oneiros" derivatives at that time may have been fueled by the current interest among English scholars in _Oneirocritica_, a book about dream interpretation by 2nd century Greek soothsayer Artemidorus Daldianus. Why the Trib, for all my beefs about it, will always be the authoritative newspaper in Chicago, and the Sun-Times will always be a second-rate goofoff: An S-T front page teaser this morning: "Jennifer To Brad: 'Time To Shave.'" Then again, I did do a sidebar on Friday for the Trib on tabloid headlines about Angelina Jolie... Only You Can Prevent Suicide: From a memo last week to Tribune employees: Tragically, in the past 15 months, two employees have lost their lives here at the Tower through apparent suicide. Sadly, these isolated incidents serve as an important reminder that we all should try to look out for the well being of our fellow employees. If you are concerned about a coworker, contact your supervisor, a Human Resources manager, or Tribune's medical director, Dr. Mary Beth Richmond at ext. [xxxx]. If you are having trouble coping with difficult or stressful situations, there is a resource available to help you: Tribune's Employee Assistance Program (EAP). Employee Assistance. I feel better about life already. While I'm ranting about the inanimate corporate being that is the Trib Co., here's a breakdown from NewCity of the Trib's takeover of Chicago Magazine: ...2002_08_04_nbiermafile_archive.html#80037667 P.J. O'Rourke interview in 
"on the Middle East, the universality of the absurd, and his beef with Mark Twain." http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/interviews/int2002-08-08.htm Morning news from
Buffeted by the economic slowdown and the fallout from Sept. 11, US Airways last evening filed for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11. Following the terrorist attacks, the airline industry is facing its most dramatic period of upheaval since deregulation 24 years ago. ... Arlington, Va.-based US Airways, which carried 56 million passengers last year, is the first major carrier to declare bankruptcy since the attacks. http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/224/nation/US_Airways_seeks_Ch_11_protection+.shtml For years, medical researchers were largely immune from lawsuits. While other doctors faced a wave of malpractice suits, researchers seeking cures for diseases such as cancer found patients eager to participate in experiments and unlikely to hire a lawyer if something went wrong. But the death of Jesse Gelsinger in 1999 changed all that. ... http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/224/metro/Lawsuits_target_medical_research+.shtml Calling himself ''the currently designated fall guy,'' the Maryland scientist at the center of the anthrax investigation denied yesterday that he is responsible for the mailings that killed five people and infected 13 others last fall. Steven J. Hatfill, a former Army research scientist described by federal investigators as a ''person of interest'' in the anthrax probe, said he had nothing to do with the mailings and decried the intense scrutiny he has been under. http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/224/nation/Scientist_denies_role_in_anthrax+.shtml more BG headlines Friday, August 09, 2002
• Link of the Day: www.oxymoronlist.com You may have too much of a life to compile literally hundreds of oxymorons in alphabetical order, but these people don't! • Number of the Day: 126 Factor by which shortstop Alex Rodriguez's salary is larger than the lowest-paid player in Major League Baseball. The league minimum for player salaries, $200,000, is almost five times the U.S. median household annual income. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61496-2002Aug8.html Is it just me, or is there something a little incongruous about Garrison Keillor forming something called "Grand Prairie LLP." Such a confluence of a corporate boardroom-ism and America's down-home, mom-and-apple-pie-in-the-heartland icon is somewhat disconcerting: http://www.twincities.com/mld/pioneerpress/news/local/3826503.htm  China's hover-train highlights the weekend edition of my Notebook Reader:
...2002_08_04_nbiermafile_archive.html#80037199 Yesterday's Reader Let the Pulitzer nominations begin: My sidebar with trimmed tabloid headlines about Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton runs on the Tempo front in this morning's Tribune. How's that for quality journalism. Are we challenging our audience as much as catering to them? Or would you say that these two obviously mentally unstable celebrities have brought it on themselves and deserve our gawks? http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/showcase/chi-0208090003aug09.story Thought of the day: religious freedom We were founded by pilgrims fleeing an overbearing religious institution. Now religious conservatives (disclosure: I'm a Christian liberal) say our country needs to get back to its roots by listening to our religious institutions. I thought of this while reading Harpers last night and coming across a note about divorced mothers in Nigeria. If you're divorced and pregnant in that country's northern states, you are stoned to death for adultery, no questions asked. A new law will defer the sentence for one and a half years to allow the mother to care for the newborn. As horrified as I was, I couldn't help thinking: this is very compelling enforcement of sexual morality--as opposed to the United States, where, thanks to the sexual revolution, people interlock genitals at the drop of a hat. But is this what the Bill Bennett's of the world desire? Clearly not, and that's where the irony comes in. These conservatives are so gung-ho about American Freedom as a sort of faith unto itself--the belief that the spread free expression and capitalism will lift poor nations from their depths (also deconstructed nicely in the latest Harper's), as if wisdom and goodness were somehow inherent to free expression and free markets--America itself is proof they're not. But it is this very engine of freedom that empowered the sexual revolution, that empowered the pilgrims to thumb their noses at the Church in the first place--in both cases, people were saying, "I know better than you, and because I love Freedom I'm going to do what I want." Now surely I can locate some middle ground between America's bacchanal sexual mores and Nigeria's Taliban-like oppression, and so can Bennett. But is there not a tension between conservatives' desire to promote freedom and religious authority at the same time? What do you think? Yesterday's Thought • Word of the Day from M-W: mordacious 1 : biting or given to biting; 2 : biting or sharp in manner or style : caustic The Earl of Carnarvan, referred to in 1650 as "mordacious," didn't go around biting people; it was his "biting" sarcasm that inspired that description. The word's association with literal biting didn't come up until later, occurring first in an 18th-century reference to "mordacious" bats. The "caustic" sense of "mordacious" is the more frequent use these days, but admittedly, neither sense is especially common. If you prefer a less esoteric option you can choose "mordant," a synonym that sees a bit more use. Both adjectives descend from Latin "mordere," a verb meaning (literally) "to bite or sting." If you want to sink your teeth into more "mordere" derivatives, you might use "mordacity" to refer to a biting quality of speech, or substitute "mordancy" for "incisiveness" or "harshness." • Places&Culture File As a journalist and cultural critic, to me economic news is at its best when it is about people, places and culture and is not just a dry listing of stock prices and earnings reports. A classic example is this piece by Mark Lewis in Slate from earlier this summer that dug into the colorful cultural context of a little-noticed news item: the de-listing of Bethlehem Steel from the NYSE. The little town of Bethlehem (Penn.) produced the guts of Rockefeller Center, the Golden Gate Bridge, Chicago's Merchandise Mart, the U.S. Supreme Court Building, and Madison Square Garden, and that's just where the story begins. Worth another look: http://slate.msn.com/?id=2067068 • more cultural economics from Slate: Adam Smith and stock options: http://www.slate.msn.com/?id=2068693 more Places&Culture from
Old-timers here still arrive by pickup truck to have their coffee and biscuits at Marty's, a plain-looking restaurant that has been a fixture for decades. Nouveau Bentonville, on the other hand, gravitates to a soaring space called the Market at Pinnacle Point, which appeared out of nowhere two years ago just down the highway in Rogers, surrounded by an office-and-shopping complex filled with Fortune 500 companies. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/07/business/07SHOP.html Dr. Donald E. Nemer does not like to make people in pain wait. So when the patient of a vacationing dentist called with a toothache one recent afternoon, Dr. Nemer squeezed him into a full schedule already made fuller by a walk-in denture readjustment, an emergency filling and an unscheduled root canal. Yet Dr. Nemer himself has been waiting for four years to retire, as a shortage of dentists in rural stretches of the upper Midwest reaches crisis proportions. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/07/health/07DENT.html For countless tourists over two and a half centuries, the Trevi Fountain has been a source of awe and a wellspring of hope, promising another visit to the Eternal City, and a wish fulfilled, to anyone who tosses coins into its gurgling waters. For Roberto Cercelletta, it has been a lucrative pool of clandestine profit. What tourists gave, Mr. Cercelletta took away — six days a week, under the cover of early-morning darkness, with a rake or magnet or his own hands, as he splashed through the late Baroque masterpiece like Anita Ekberg in "La Dolce Vita," albeit less cinematically. Early this morning, when he took his usual dip under Neptune's feet, police officers were watching, and arrested him. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/07/international/europe/07ROME.html On its face, it sounded like the perfect share-the-wealth plan. Amid the sugarcane fields here on the island of Negros, one of the Philippines' most powerful tycoons, Eduardo M. Cojuangco Jr., the chairman of the beer and food conglomerate San Miguel, offered nearly 1,800 peasants who worked about 10,000 acres of land under his control a free stake in a plantation venture he would run. A "corporative," he dubbed it. But ever since that deal five years ago, the "shareholders" have not received their share of the plantation's profits, nor seen a statement of what those profits are. Instead, they have been paid an annual dividend of roughly $200, a sum critics denounce as a pay-off to discourage the peasants from asserting their rights to the land. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/02/business/worldbusiness/02PHIL.html Thursday, August 08, 2002
I recently received a couple variations of the years-old Nigerian e-mail hoax, As a public service I'm posting them here. A word of advice: when the letter says, The following information are required from you urgently: Your personal telephone and fax numbers, your banking details where the money will be transferred, your full names and contact address and your date of birth (indicate sex and marital status) --WALK AWAY! Unbelievably, the Washington Post says over 300 people, who bled $20 million, didn't. ...2002_08_04_nbiermafile_archive.html#79993736 links: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A64335-2002Apr28 http://www.zdnet.com/products/stories/reviews/0,4161,2609884,00.html http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,53115,00.html http://www.motherlandnigeria.com/scam_page.html http://www.quatloos.com/cm-niger/nigerian_scam_letter_museum.htm http://www.state.gov/www/regions/africa/naffpub.pdf Urban Issues Watch: I'm keeping an eye on city issues and thought for my book on theology and the city, so I clipped this piece from 
The four-day "Cities and Globalization" summit at the 71st annual Couchiching Institute on Public Affairs conference explores issues facing Canadian cities trying to cope with globalization at a time when most decision-making power lies with the provincial and federal governments. Some of the issues that the conference will be addressing are: How local communities can turn globalization to their advantage and mitigate any destructive effects; How cities and regions can carve out an identity and maintain their historic role as economic engines, immigration melting pots and cultural powerhouses; How other foreign cities are evolving to survive in the global economy. http://www.torontostar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?... Also see: in-depth review of the American angle on this at http://www.thepublicinterest.com/current/article1.html  Headlines that actually matter: Russian floods...China chooses Australia for big gas deal...Planet Earth gets pudgy...and more in today's edition of my Notebook Reader:
...2002_08_04_nbiermafile_archive.html#79988845 Yesterday's Reader I was looking for a way to include these longtime bloggers in my blogging story last week, but it didn't happen. They're worth a read: WilWheaton.net NeilGaiman.com And here's one I included in the full Blogathon blog but not the story, that's worth a bookmark: AndyDeHnart.com • Thought of the day: the ambiguity of human nature: Are people basically bad or basically good? Ever since the Enlightenment the consensus has seemed to be "good" after centuries of "bad," but since the genocide-laced 20th Century we haven't been so sure. My own strand of Christianity--Calvinist Protestantism, has always said "bad," and not to be a pessimist, but I agree. Every human being is vulnerable to his or her own pride, lusts, envy, and every human being hurts others because of them. We all need mending, the type of self-transformation which Oprah-variety cheerleading suggests you do yourself (more here) but which reason holds can only come from a higher power (i.e. the Cross). I'm a little torn by the "bad" verdict, though, because human goodness, programmed into our DNA before evil entered the world, still shines through in striking moments. Here on the streets of Chicago I can see strangers being kind to each other, patiently giving directions to tourists, giving up their seats on the bus to older riders; more profoundly, the altruism poured out at Ground Zero on September 11 almost seems to support America's view of its own righteousness, if not the simple-minded moralism of President Bush's good-vs-evil worldview (although the silly relativism of liberals hardly holds much water, either--unless you think Osama bin Laden was just expressing his equally valid point of view). But the "bad" seeps through in subtle, countless ways. Americans have long believed most people are good, evil is the result of a few evil people, and evil can be reduced by eliminating evil people--this view, the Hollywood Catechism, is the basis for 99 percent of American movies. By contrast, I believe all people have latent evil in them and evil can be reduced only by divine transformation (cue the Cross again). If President Bush still doubts this, he should ask his friend Ken Lay, a seemingly righteous man who succumbed to his own lust for power and devastated the lives of many he had been called to serve. There's nothing morally clear about your outer projection--no such thin as national or geographical righteousness--only every human being's struggle to balance the good and evil within them, a hopeless struggle without the Cross. Yesterday's Thought • Sports&Culture: Keith Olbermann in 
If David McCullough's next biography informs me that one of the few remaining unprofiled Founding Fathers had, in 1775, christened his plow oxen "Lexington" and "Concord," I wouldn't be a bit surprised. Appropriating the transcendent for our own personal use -- whether to make a buck or enhance the meaning of our lives -- is all-American. Still, there is something over-the-top about Florida State football coach Bobby Bowden's selection of his team's 2002 slogan, "Let's Roll." http://salon.com/news/sports/col/olbermann/2002/08/07/lets_roll/index2.html Thomas Friedman's Sunday column, worth a second look, from
The State Department, in a real profile in courage, said it was "deeply disappointed" by the conviction of Mr. Ibrahim, who holds a U.S. passport. "Disappointed"? I'm disappointed when the Baltimore Orioles lose. When an Egyptian president we give $2 billion a year to jails a pro-American democracy advocate, I'm "outraged" and expect America to do something about it. ... This ties in with a larger concern that human rights activists share toward America today — a concern that post-9/11 America is not interested anymore in law and order, just order, and it's not interested in peace and quiet, but just quiet. ... How about before we go trying to liberate a whole country — Iraq — we first liberate just one man, one good man, who is now sitting in an Egyptian jail for pursuing the very democratic ideals that we profess to stand for. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/04/opinion/04FRIE.html Wednesday, August 07, 2002
• Link of the day: www.allfreeessays.com The joke's on you if you try to cheat (you slime) and download these papers to turn in as your own--they're not that good! • Number of the day: 14,000 ATM's in the national network of Bank of America--2,000 of which, in California, will feature on-screen ads on a trial basis. http://www.morningnewsbeat.com/#MNB1 • Quote of the day: "People have been asking me how this happened, and I have to tell them, 'I don't know.'" Jefferson County (Ky) deputy coroner Richard Siclari, after a local family found the wrong body lying in the casket at the funeral of their son, who turned out to be alive in a nearby hospital. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/... A letter-writer to MediaNews happens to make a useful addition to my thoughts yesterday on personal media, and this young newspaperman is all for the letter-writer's plan to let the rookies rule the roost! ...2002_08_04_nbiermafile_archive.html#79954729  That's one small step for woman: Jennifer Granholm wins her primary on her way to being Michigan's first woman governor. Wouldn't that be a welcome sight. Although we should probably guard against making too much of her being a woman and too little of her as a politician; that's a reverse form of sexism. Coverage in the Detroit News and Free Press.Editor Ann Marie Lipinski says her vision for the Chicago Tribune is to be "the leading citizen of this great metropolis." This morning my assignment was to prepare a sidebar highlighting the bizarre developments in the Angelina Jolie-Billy Bob Thornton breakup. Sigh. Speaking of leading citizen, the Trib's Jim Kirk writes of his employer: The Chicago Tribune's $35 million purchase of Chicago magazine again raised the specter of big media's influence on readers and advertisers by having one company own the area's top-selling newspaper, the top-rated radio station, a big TV station, a professional baseball team, a cable station and Internet sites--and now a city magazine. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/showcase/chi-0208070308aug07.story How exactly is this good for Chicago? Double sigh. After weeks of worrying someone on the sardine-ish subway will slip their hand into my bag and snatch something valuable, I emerged from the El last week with a gray pen clipped to the front pocket of my bag. Sorry! If anyone wants to claim it let me know.  Oh, no, not a return to summer shark news! Other probing questions, including the fate of Germany's chancellor and the future of San Fransisco's WW2 memorial, in today's edition of my Notebook Reader:
...2002_08_04_nbiermafile_archive.html#79945369 Yesterday's Reader • Thought of the Day: Would we be better off with lower voter turnout? The conventional wisdom is that the public is increasingly cynical, detached, disengaged, uninformed, overentertained, and downright disrespectfully neglectful of its privilege to vote. All of which is true, as I've ranted before. But what is the alternative? The utopian vision is that the masses would embrace enlightenment, crave information about politicians and policies, and make wise choices with high standards that would force our leaders to be more principled, clear, intellectual, and substantive. The more realistic vision is this: the public would benefit little from consuming more news (case made beautifully in this article), which, in TV's case, oversimplifies, cheesifies, and ignores issues in favor of images, and which, in newspapers' case, are mostly about political strategy and not public policy. So if driftwood apathetic moderates did glance over at the news more often and/or vote, it would mean an influx of people who are ill-informed to make good decisions, fueling the current problem of making politics a glamor-and-sound-bite contest. And we saw in 2000 the problem of candidates paying attention to the middle--a watered-down contest that was so stale it turned everybody off. If fewer people voted, only the die-hards would be left and candidates would feel free to be more ideological and worry more about coming up with useful ideas than selling platitudes as though at a shopping mall. Besides, if more people voted, it would only make politicians feel more powerful, and their Macy-balloon-sized egos are big enough already, thank you. This is all a little tongue-in-cheek, I hope you realize, prompted by reading this sentence in the Detroit News this morning about yesterday's Michigan primary: "Turnout was sluggish in some locations, despite -- or because of -- sunny and cool conditions through Metro Detroit." If the democratic future of our country depends on the weather, we are worse off than I feared. What do you think? Yesterday's Thought I meant to post this, too. Slate's Dahlia Lithwick is one of the few to actually ask what exactly Zacarias Moussaoui is being tried for: Scrutinizing the indictment, three possibilities emerge: the government is not presenting crucial evidence tying Mr. Moussaoui to the Sept. 11 attacks; the government has no evidence tying Mr. Moussaoui to the Sept. 11 attacks; or federal conspiracy law is so infinitely elastic that Mr. Moussaoui could receive the death penalty for simply buying knives, learning to fly and training in Qaeda camps. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/02/opinion/02LITH.html (I was, though, bugged by the grammatical error is the first sentence, which suggests that the possibilities themselves have done the scrutinizing. Grrr.) I meant to post this last week: who has lived as much 20th Century American cultural history as Irv Kupcinet, the Chicago Sun-Times columnist who turned 90 last week? He's been a newspaper columnist, an actor, and a football player, ref, and announcer, just to begin with: http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/31kupstory.html • Thoughts&Culture File: Benjamin Barber, author of Jihad vs McWorld Capitalism is not too strong; democracy is too weak. We have not grown too hubristic as producers and consumers; we have grown too timid as citizens, acquiescing to deregulation and privatization (airlines, accounting firms, banks, media conglomerates, you name it) and a growing tyranny of money over politics. ... Market fundamentalism, which defined the era of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, encourages a myth of omnipotent markets. But this is as foolish and wrong-headed as the myth of omnipotent states, which reigned from the New Deal to the Great Society. It tricks people into believing their own common power represents some bureaucrat's hegemony over them, and that buying power is the same as voting power. But consumers are not citizens, and markets cannot exercise democratic sovereignty. The ascendant market ideology claims to free us, but it actually robs us of the civic freedom by which we control the social consequences of our private choices. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/29/opinion/29BARB.html R.C. Longworth, Chicago Tribune Through small steps, like the cheese verdict, and big ones, like the creation of a single currency, Europe today is less than a United States of Europe but much more than a loose group of nations doing business with each other. The European Union is unique in history, and its success has emerged only gradually through a system so complex that it is barely understood by many Europeans and almost not at all by Americans. This success and this American incomprehension are causing real trans-Atlantic problems. The EU has emerged at age 45 as a partner and rival to the United States, potent in some areas such as trade and incomplete in other areas such as defense. The way it operates, through tortuous negotiations and compromise, baffles and frustrates the hard-driving unilateralists of Washington, who are increasingly intolerant of the slow-motion decision-making of their closest allies. European officials say they want to keep Washington happy. But they aren't willing to abandon a union and a process that has turned their continent from a war-flattened wasteland to a landscape of peace and prosperity unprecedented in European history, just to please the Americans. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/showcase/chi-0207310289jul31.story Tuesday, August 06, 2002
Analysis of analysis: All things Madden in today's Salon. This covers it well. But in the discussion about whether people are tuning into Monday Night Football for Madden or for the game, what about the fact that a huge chunk of MNF watchers are at sports bars, where the sound may be off or drowned out? (These folks aren't counted by Nielsen, by the way, last I checked, which is never mentioned in stories about MNF's ratings.) It seems that should be part of the Madden and MNF speculation. http://www.salon.com/news/sports/col/kaufman/2002/08/06/madden/index.html A footnote from Quentin Schultze on personal media and public responsibility: I think the personal voice is important for "good" journalism, which stands above plain reporting (or telegraphic reporting) in my book. But the personal needs to be tied to the public, to the common, shared interest (and shared good).  I've been thinking about this in relation to the future of newspapers, which are captive to old-fashioned standards of "objectivity," which so neutralize and paralyze the text that they become almost unreadably boring (great read on this here). The opposite problem is columnists (and increasingly reporters) raving wildly off the top of their head, merely puffing up their own egos and peering for their own reflection in the mediated space. I was trying to toe the middle ground with my blogging piece in the Tribune and make it personal but also responsible and useful. This balance must be the future of newspapers. As fantastic LA Times columnist Steve Lopez says in a must-read
Howard Kurtz profile today: A column ought to have blood pumping through it... [Too many people today] don't feel a human connection to this newspaper. That's exactly it. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47872-2002Aug5.html  This image thing is fun, and will inevitably lead to the gratuitous posting of various pictures hereafter. You've been warned. Here's a photo of Hawaii's Kalauea volcano spewing lava last Friday. It's been going for 19 years. I feel bad about this. Should I? I was glad to get a mailing the other day from the Veterans of Foreign Wars, since they sometimes send you return address labels in the unsuccessful (in my case) attempt to collect a donation. Alas, I was greatly disappointed to instead get a calendar. I need those labels!  <--This is just a completely random, irrelevant attempt to post this picture of Boston from yesterday's Boston Globe, just to see how images work in weblogs...I grit my teeth and include a simplistic romantic riff about the American frontier from the boilerplate-predictable Wall Street Journal in my Notebook Reader today, trying to prove I'm not all left-wing-conspiracy: ...2002_08_04_nbiermafile_archive.html#79899774 Yesterday's Reader My friend Nathan checks back in from Canada, this time from the Hudson Bay, where he's again rubbed sensitive local government the wrong way--...2002_08_04_nbiermafile_archive.html#79852287--and passes along this story from the Globe and Mail, which has a little bit of everything--drama, power, pastries--all in one article. Thought of the day: the constant push-pull tension of relationships. I should be able to dig this up, but one of the theories I studied last spring in a communications class was the push-pull phenomenon of relationships: in a relationship with another person, we are in constant tension between the need to get closer and the need to pull away. The two are always butting heads, and which one emerges, and when, explains most interpersonal conflict and most solutions to it. This is usually said of romance, but I think it holds for friendships. We are constantly calculating, or just constantly in emotional flux, weighing or feeling our need to get closer to someone else, to open ourselves up more to them and invest more in them, versus our need to pull back, maintain our space, stay in our safety zone. It's not just psychobabble; it's simple math. It's science. It's abstract art. For me the question is poignant when it comes to my new marriage. Now is the time to mark my territory, right? To be heard, to announce where I stand, for now we are establishing lifelong patterns of communication and problem-solving. But at the same time I need to get closer to my wife, to pour myself out for her, to take risks by being more vulnerable to her. So which do I do--stand my ground or be vulnerable? When do I do which? This is why relationships are so complicated in a broken world--we all are struggling with this tension, this fluctuation, and we all resolve it in different ways at different times. Pull back, and we can harm ourselves by thinking ourselves righteous and ignoring (or solely shouldering) our own brokenness. Get closer, and another person can hurt you, since they are broken, too. It is this tenuous equilbrium that defines practically all emotional human interaction. There actually is a town called Knockemstiff, Ohio, says Tim Jones in today's Trib: Knockemstiff is one of the peculiar historical pleasures that is ignored as Ohio prepares to celebrate its 200th anniversary next year. The rough-and-tumble history of the town is sketchy and largely anecdotal, but unlike oddly named places such as Tightwad, Mo., Nimrod, Minn., and Monkey's Eyebrow, Ky., Knockemstiff's history, until recently, has been true to the town's name. Especially at the Bull Pen Bar, where life resembled the bar scene in "Star Wars."http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/showcase/chi-0208060175aug06.story Election Day handicapping from the Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49504-2002Aug6.html Daley blasts Trib: Boy, who do you root for in this one--a consistently arrogant city government or the overbearing Tribune Co.? What a clash of disagreeable titans. The city is blocking the Trib's longed-for expansion of Wrigley Field, seemingly for stubborn, nose-thumbing reasons--Daley wants to slap back at the other major power in town. It's your job to criticize me; it's your job to bring negative news, not good news ... You want people to fight with each other, you want to bring out the worst of society. Hizzoner sure picks his spots--he unburdened himself of this rant "at a news conference unveiling a program for at-risk youth." http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/showcase/chi-0208040388aug04.story How'd we get here? Says the smirking Sun-Times: A vindictive mayor grappling with a budget crunch on the eve of re-election. A corporate "culture of arrogance." An astounding string of public relations blunders by a company that's supposed to be in the communications business. But, the S-T says, it's not all a battle of pride: Throughout the weekend, sports talk shows were filled with speculation that Mayor Daley had finally gotten even with the Chicago Tribune for the newspaper's crusade against the renovation of Soldier Field. But that explanation--as plausible as it seems for a mayor who loves to get even--conveniently ignores the fact that Daley has a history of siding with local residents on development issues. http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-wrig06.html Ah, politics in Chicago. A sport only die-hard fans can bear to watch. Monday, August 05, 2002
Link of the day: www.savemartha.com Not everybody is jumping to conclusions on the Martha Stewart scandal. See this write-up in Newsweek: http://www.msnbc.com/news/788685.asp Number of the day: 70: Number of movie theater screens in the United States equipped to show digital movies, out of a total of 36,700. http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/2002-08-04-digital_x.htm Quote of the day: "People don't realize there's a person behind the tattoos." Melissa Noble, tattoo-covered gym regular in Denver http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/... Here's today's edition of my Notebook Reader, a daily digest of noteworthy public discourse: ...2002_08_04_nbiermafile_archive.html#79858724 Previous Reader Two more of my Trib pieces, actually one story and one Q&A, in the paper's city-cheerleading vein: http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/showcase/chi-0208040399aug04.story http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/showcase/chi-0208040393aug04.story - archive of my Trib stuff I love John Madden, but the big man can come up short on hard-hitting analysis. In one of his first columns for ESPN.com, Madden uncorks the word "great" 6 times, the phrase "look forward to" 3 times, and throws in a pair of "good"'s and a couple "big"'s. The insight hardly matches the energy. Still, I'll be watching the first Monday Night Football tonight in its most promising rebirth since the Cosell era. Leftover (but important) link from Friday: partisan independents. The Wash. Post says the majority of independents sway left or right. That seems to make sense; I know that I pride myself on being an independent, but will vote Democrat 99% of the time. I guess what I really value is independence from the institution of the Democratic Party, with all its flaws, failings, and hatred of people and ideas I love on the right. But I'll still vote for candidates I more often agree with. What do you think, is that a common phenomenon among independents? http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35685-2002Aug2.html Thought of the day: what "difference" does it make? A visit to the breathtaking Shedd Aquarium on Saturday was dulled only by a smug lecture by a pedantic oceanarium trainer on how you, too, can make a difference--by not littering plastic bags in the water, where dolphins chomp down on them thinking they're squid, by not wasting paper napkins, and so on. Point taken, and it's truly sad how marine life is gravely threatened by people's stupidity. But I started wondering about the constant plea to make a difference. (After all, the sermon went, imagine if everybody here littered one bag...so you see, you too can make a difference.) The more I thought about it the phrase seemed odd. I mean, there are other options for expressions of idealism: make the world a better place, save the dolphins, and so on--but they don't come up as often as make a difference. And I couldn't help but think that the phrasing is a little fatalistic, a little stab at immortality--make a difference so you won't feel futile on your deathbed, so you can know that your brief life made some sort of imprint on the globe. And then you have to wonder about the motivation implied here--clean up not just because it's the right thing to do or because it's good for the ecosystem, but because it's your chance to matter, to not fade into oblivion. And part of me wonders, wouldn't I rather have people valuing environmental health for animals' sake than for their own? Friday, August 02, 2002
You could say this rotisserie geek got a life: ESPN The Magazine reports that Ernie DiFranchi, a Port Authority technology officer, left his co-workers at breakfast on the morning of September 11 to go up to his office on the 71st floor of the World Trade Center's north tower, arriving early in order to make a fantasy baseball transaction before his league's 9 a.m. deadline. As soon as the first plane hit, DiFranchi escaped down the stairs, but he believes his two friends died in the elevators going up--where he would have been had he not been playing fantasy baseball. In a somewhat morbid gesture, a Phillies beat reporter heard about the story and arranged for a meeting between DiFranchi and Chicago White Sox right fielder Magglio Ordonez, the player DiFranchi waived in his 9-11 move. DiFranchi gave Ordonez his Port Authority survivor's pin, and Ordonez said DiFranchi "owed him one." That's just weird on several levels. We still have yet to hear an example of one columnist's suggested urban legend that a World Trade Center worker is awakened at a girlfriend's house by a desperate post-attack cell phone call from his wife on the morning of the 11th, and indicts himself by lying that he is at work. It should be just a matter of time before these stories start to emerge. One of the finest political authors and analysts is Kevin Phillips, most recently the author of Wealth and Democracy: Political History of the American Rich. He goes back and forth with The Atlantic's James Fallows in an e-mail exchange: The Democrats have for some years now had a large slice of the richest Americans who make their money from high tech, the media, entertainment, and, increasingly, finance. Could they lose some of the Jewish portion of this "high end" support to the Republicans because of Bush's pro-Israel position? Yes, but if something resembling World War Three starts in the Middle East in 2002 or 2003, the backlash against Bush's regional policies could be powerful. The Bible Belt may be willing to go in Armageddon's way, but I wouldn't be so sure about Colorado, Illinois, or New Jersey. http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/fallows/jf2002-07-03/phillips1.htm Also see: Phillips on being FDR for a day: http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/fallows/jf2002-07-03/phillips3.htm And, from The New Republic, an emerging Democratic majority? http://www.thenewrepublic.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020805&s=judis080502 I watched one episode of the highly acclaimed Six Feet Under, and that was enough. It's well-written but heavy and dark (both in tone and in actual lighting). I thought it was just me but Slate's Emily Nussbaum articulately says she is not impressed: http://www.slate.msn.com/?id=2068478 I knew the Tribune's TV critic, Steve Johnson, was one of the show's supporters, so I asked him what he thought of Nussbaum's review: Debunking a crowd favorite is certainly a fun thing to do when you can, in good conscience, do it. She convinces me that she believes what she's writing, which is, amazingly, often not the case with attempted debunks. And while I certainly recognize the show in her characterization of it, I disagree with most of her key opinions, especially about Brenda. As for the melodramatic piling-on, I've come to believe that's just something you have to accept if you are to live with a TV series. When you like a show, you make peace with the absurdity; when you don't, it is, of course, absurd. Every so often, when hearing Christian conservatives (I'm a Christian liberal, FYI) bloviate about America's abandonment of its (supposedly) Christian roots, I wonder if they take heart that we're not Europe, whose church attendance is one fourth of ours. So I e-mailed former presidential candidate Gary Bauer to find out. "Yes I do take comfort in the fact that religiosity is still relatively high in the U.S. compared to Europe. Sincerely, Gary Bauer." Sure enough. God Bless America. http://www.amvalues.org/ Philly corpses get pensions...Japan challenges counterfeiters...U.S. to drill in Siberia ...and more from today's installment of my Notebook Reader: ...2002_07_28_nbiermafile_archive.html#79739856 My on-the-scene report from last month's Blue Man Group auditions was trimmed from the Tribune, so I'm posting it here: http://chicago.freeservers.com/features/blueman.html My Blogathon report runs this morning in the Chicago Tribune. (you can log in with my member name and password of "nbiermaread") permanent link: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/chi-0208020005aug02.story A few footnotes : - I had some creative differences with my editors over the tone of the piece which seem to strike at the heart of blogging itself. I tried to write with a more reportorial than personal tone because of 1) my disgust with the endless blogger blather out there about pointless personal details, 2) my goal to show that blogs could be informative, even discursive, rather than just a personal blowhole, and 3) the fact that my life that Saturday wasn't particularly fascinating, but (at least I thought) my subjects--the state of blogs and the future of words--were. But I deferred to their view that readers would wonder how someone reacts to staying awake, let alone typing, for so long. In so doing, I may have tilted it to far to the personal side. - I asked if the text of the article could be represented differently in the paper somehow--the hyperlinks could be underlined and the quotes italicized (as they were in the blog). But it turns out such font-fiddling wouldn't be compatible with our CCI editing system. I took it as a revealing and awkward confrontation of new media and old. (By the way, I don't mean to be knocking my editors; they gave me wise help to steer the piece and I trust their judgment.) - I'd feel awful if I didn't correct one copy editing error that made UC-Berkeley professor Paul Grabowiczsay that his course is a sign that the academy has lost its mind, rather than that his course has irrationally been taken as a sign that the academy has lost its mind. It was right in the weblog and got screwed up in the editing phase (see, blogs can be more reliable than print, not just the other way around!) As the saying goes, the Tribune regrets the error. - Outstanding Trib cultural critic Julia Keller did a fine piece this week on the digitalization of the Gutenberg Bible, which is in keeping with my ponderings of the future of words in a digital age http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/... Thought of the day: the idyllic notion of home as haven vs. the need to get out and change the world: Even though my wife and I life in an apartment in the heart of the city, blocks away from housing projects, I think we feel our home is a safe haven from the noise, grit, and anonymity of city life. It's a far cry from the artificial suburban existence of our Michigan hometown, where people groom their huge lawns and lock their double- or triple-stall-garage doors and rejoice in their safe, saccharine lives. Since the suburbanization of the 50s (and perhaps industrialization around the turn of the century), it has been consummately American to think of the home as a holy sanctuary from outside life. As far as I know, this is a recent and odd cultural value. Before, home life blended into public life casually, intimately, and, yes, odorously. Perhaps never before the American 20th Century did people value private life and fear public life, rather than the other way around. This suburban-bred impulse of my wife and I to lock our doors to the outside is in one sense a survival function and in another a flaw. We have been called to serve the city, as citizens, as workers, as Christians. If everybody stayed inside and feared the outside, the world would only get worse. The home-as-haven myth ignores 1) the evil and sorrow that can lurk inside the home 2) the pleasantness and happiness that can lie outside it and 3) our calling to make the world a better place. The baby daughter of one of my favorite writers, James Lileks, sums it up profoundly, as he asks her where home is: She pondered, and said: outside. She's right, of course. Our house is outside. It just seems like a strange way of thinking of it, because we think of houses as defining interior space. But she's right: all the houses in the world are outside. http://www.lileks.com/bleats/archive/02/0702/070302.html#080102 Thursday, August 01, 2002
Quote of the day: I never envisioned the purpose of life as taking a piece of metal and pushing it toward a hole. People ought to be pushing children out of poverty. Ralph Nader, telling Time magazine why he won't retire and play golf. Great interview, by the way: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101020805-332031,00.html Number of the day: 6: price, in dollars, to which a barrel of oil could fall (from around $20) if the U.S. invades Iraq and forces OPEC's hand. Of course, it could go up to $60, too, says Thomas Friedman: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/31/opinion/31FRIE.html (log in with member name and password of "nbiermaread") Peace in Africa? ... Princess Di memorial designer chosen ... Dishwashing detergent, ducks and oil spills --and more in today's installment of my Notebook Reader: ...2002_07_28_nbiermafile_archive.html#79697034 Yesterday's Reader Urban planning think tank to Louisville: Cooperate or become the next Atlanta: The Brookings Institution's verdict is in on the need for "regionalism" in Kentucky's largest metropolis: http://www.courier-journal.com/localnews/2002/08/01/ke080102s251581.htm Tourism is down at the Taj Mahal, says the BBC: The Taj Mahal, India's world-famous monument to love, has for years been the country's biggest tourist attraction. But in the northern city of Agra, home to the 17th century palace, tourists are now almost nowhere to be seen. ... Daily admissions of foreign tourists are usually low in July, averaging about 400-500 on week days. This year, however, that figure has fallen to 150 - less than a third of the normal level - according to a senior security official. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/2164632.stm Welcome to August, or A Different Kind of Priest Scandal In Rome: An August 1 history special... The Roman emperor Augustus may have had the messy assassination of his adopted father, Julius Caesar, and the pesky emergence of Jesus of Nazareth on his mind, but it didn't keep him from overlooking a quirk in the calendar. It seems the priests running the official Roman calendar missed the memo saying leap year is every four years, not every three, as they had been doing for decades. So Augustus fixed it by doing nothing--declaring no leap year for 12 years to get the calendar back in sync with Mother Nature's body clock. This act of calendar-calibrating was enough to get a month named after him, as the consuls of the day rechristened the month of Sextilis, and even gave him an extension, stretching the month from 30 days to 31. http://www.greenheart.com/billh/julian.html Typos and Polygamy: Freudian typo in yesterday's Maureen Dowd column? In my copy of the NY Times, printed in Chicago, a sentence about Hillary Clinton ran as such: She made a boffo keynote speech Monday at the Democratic Leadership Council meeting in New York, bashing the president's economic record compared with her husbands. The missing apostrophe in the last word seems to change it from a possessive to a plural, with adulterous consequences (though perhaps not incongruous with the a-monogamic legacy of the administration). I noticed the error was corrected online. The Internet is getting less and less free, says the NY Times, and surfers are seemingly softening their resistance to paying for content. Seems to validate the prophecies of TheEndOfFree.com. My fears about this are similar to my fears of pay-per-view TV--it's a can of worms which, once opened, will someday lead to having to pay for everything from "SportsCenter" to stock quotes to nickel-per-message e-mail. But pragmatically, the-end-of-free may be a natural reaction to the dramatic failure of banner ads (and those insidious pop-up ads). http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/01/technology/01ONLI.html (log in with member name and password of "nbiermaread") Wednesday, July 31, 2002
Chicago architecture watch: The Trump Tower is back on track, says Blair Kamin: http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/chi-0207310004... (log in with member name and password of "nbiermaread") Today's edition of my Notebook Reader, a daily digest of noteworthy public discourse, is off the presses. ...2002_07_28_nbiermafile_archive.html#79652969 Number of the day: 400: Americans who die each year from heat-related illnesses, more than double the annual fatalities from tornadoes, earthquakes, and floods combined, says Eric Klinenberg. Word of the Day, from M-W: abecedarian \ay-bee-see-DAIR-ee-un\ (adjective) *1 a : of or relating to the alphabet b : alphabetically arranged; 2 : rudimentary Example sentence: The children recited an abecedarian chant, beginning with "A is for apple" and ending with "Z is for zebra." The history of "abecedarian" is as simple as ABC -- literally. The term's Late Latin ancestor, "abecedarius" (which meant "of the alphabet"), was created as a combination of the letters A, B, C, and D, plus the suffix "-arius"; you can hear the echo of that origin in the pronunciation of the English term (think "ABC-darian"). In its oldest documented English uses in the early 1600s, "abecedarian" was a noun meaning "one learning the rudiments of something"; it specifically referred to someone who was learning the alphabet.The adjective began appearing in English texts around 1665. So there's an ombusdman for ombudsmen. Who knew? Much-needed, given below: http://www.ombudsgod.blogspot.com/ ANOTHER BLOW IS STRUCK AGAINST MEDIA INDEPENDENCE: The Chicago Tribune has just bought Chicago Magazine, continuing its ravenous gobbling of local (and national) media. Publisher Scott Smith cheerfully announces in a memo: "This acquisition allows Chicago Tribune to continue expanding the ways in which it serves local readers and advertisers in Chicago, just as it does through several other targeted publications it owns and operates." Underscore the word "advertisers" in the above. The winners in this deal are the Trib's ad sales people, who can now sell meatier ad packages that include space in the Trib and Chicago mag (and WGN TV and radio and...) The readers are losers, since they will get less reporting and writing done by fewer people spread over more media synergistic space, as the Trib and Chicago mag start to share resources. Meanwhile, what of Steve Rhodes' media column? How can he possibly claim to speak as an independent watchdog of local media? A friend who just came to the Trib from Chicago mag says one of Steve's worries will be having his e-mail address end in "@tribune.com" and then ask for tips. As Romenesko asks, is this the end of profiles of Trib people? Not to bite the hand that feeds me, but how can the Trib come across as so self-righteous about its ethical hairsplitting on the question of the Ground Zero photographer while smugly plowing ahead with this disservice to its readers, this watering down of their media diet? (And don't get me started one of the all-time major breaches of conflict of interest, the Trib's ownership of the Chicago Cubs...) Cleaning out my notes on blogging, here's a Time Inc. magazine editor I got to know in New York whose judgement I respect: I think the blogs-vs-old media story is overblown, largely because when the media reports on itself, the hall-of-mirrors effect magnifies everything. That said, many blogs are a refreshing alternative to the stale and predictable punditocracy, but ... offer no real challenge to the meat-and-potatoes business of news gathering. Letters to Sports Illustrated about its recent NASCAR cover: - Thank you for your article on the booming interest in NASCAR (NASCAR Nation, July 1). After I started following NASCAR in 1996, I found I did not miss talk of collective bargaining agreements, lockouts and strikes, inflated egos, trade demands, salary caps, athlete arrests and drug use. NASCAR is about real people. The drivers are great role models, and their accessibility to the fans is unmatched in any sport. Can you imagine being able to listen to Shaq's thoughts during a game the way fans can tune into their favorite drivers, via radio scanners, during a race? DEE DEE MULLENIX Las Vegas - NASCAR may yet replace baseball as America's national pastime, but I wonder if this is necessarily a good thing. In your picture of two bikini-topped fans, I can make out at least five Confederate flags in the background. Somehow I doubt that those flags are being flown only to commemorate the tradition of gentility and charm that the South is known for. How many drivers in NASCAR are nonwhite? NASCAR races are fun to watch, and the drivers are certainly very skilled, but until the sport acknowledges its lack of diversity, I don't think NASCAR deserves all the fawning adulation that it gets. MARK JEANFREAU, New Orleans Tuesday, July 30, 2002
My latest story for the Tribune: http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/chi-0207300156jul30.story?coll=chi%2Dleisuretempo%2Dhed (log in with member name and password of "nbiermaread") Thought of the day: More Blogathonning, please! 48 hours after I rose from my post-Blogathon hibernation, I feel, strangely, fine. I'm awake and chipperly chatting with people at work, and on as normal a sleep schedule as I ever am. I napped for the last two hours of the event, then slept three and a half hours, and got 8-9 hours each of the last two nights. Not as bad as I thought. I just turned in my article for the Tribune; it will be running Friday. I got 190 unique visitors on Blogathon day, I appreciate the interest. Sunday, July 28, 2002
That's it. I made it 24 hours straight. Tribune Charities is $100 richer, which would be even more comforting if I were more than half-conscious...good night (or morning), and I won't be blogging again for a few days, if not a few weeks... Here is an index of highlights (again, using the term generously) from my blog during Blogathon:
The end is in sight. The light at the end of the tunnel is the rising sun. I really have enjoyed this, although my body is now violently protesting the lack of sleep; I haven't felt this ill in a while...thank goodness the following is pre-written: I thought I should end by doing a little more explaining about what this blog is about; particularly what you might see when you come back here (don't worry, I'll mostly shelve the metaphysical discussions about the ontological nature of words).
As I said in my Blogathon Guide, I keep my blog 1) as a personal resource for column ideas and links, 2) for writing practice, to keep my writing gears greased, and 3) to try to contribute a little substance to the high-waste world of the blogosphere. My topics include news, politics, media, culture, history, religion, the arts, movies, sports, and anything else that catches my fancy.
I also post e-mail feedback to my stories in the Tribune and elsewhere. Recently I've been posting anecdotes and other quotes from sources I picked up from the cutting room floor when my stories go to print. I find this a fascinating extension of the journalist's job; every other forum I enter, the more accountable and helpful I am to readers, and that can only be good for everyone.
This does raise some interesting questions. Should I be bashing the Tribune Company in my weblog, since they write my paychecks? (Andrew Sullivan was cut loose from the NY Times in part because of his Times-flogging in his blog.) Could someone sue me for defamation of character based on something I post in my blog ?(which laughably assumes I have any wealth worth suing for...) In the meantime, it remains a great outlet for writing and communicating. One last angle to explore here on the question of the future of words, and that's the hyperlink. Basically, a hyperlink is a word like this that links to something else, in this case home page. The hyperlink, developed two or three decades ago, changes the fiber of the word more than anything else, and largely for the better. For centuries words were printed on a page, dried and dead until the paper was destroyed. With hyperlinks, the basis of blogging, words take on a new dynamism. They organically connect to other ideas, other words, or images or sounds. The interconnectedness is unprecedented. The downside is that blogs can link without context, fraying the fabric of the text until it is so broken down that all hope of context and coherence is lost. Literacy Online calls hyperlinks "the computer's capacity to create such fluid textual structures and present them interactively to the reader," and continues:
And although I will bemoan the e-book's eventual corrosion of bound books, I will grant the authors this:
And that is why the fluid format of the Web, and weblogs in particular, contain a nugget of promise. My friend Nathan once mentioned that one of the casualties of e-mail is the joy of looking through old letters a generation later. E-mails you wrote in college are gone when you graduate, vanishing under a delete function. Whereas before you would pass on letters by grandma or mom to the kids. The thought made me go through my e-mail folders and print some correspondence that stood out, and file it in my college scrapbook. Hunger is clawing at my insides. I just looked out the window and did a double take as I saw the sky brightening with the hint of Chicago's sunrise. I need a nap, see you at six. Relevant clipping from Time magazine a week or two ago by Harold Bloom, author and literary critic: Regard for poetry has slipped a great deal. That is because at its best, with very rare exceptions, even simple and very direct poetry is now quite difficult for most readers. But what is not difficult for most readers? In our society, in which the screen dominates and everything is visual and the flood of information is incessant, teaching people how to read is a major enterprise. From The Electronic Word How can one argue that rhetoric, an education built on the word, has regained its centrality when the word itself shows every symptom of radical decline? When the test scores that measure popular literacy worsen each year? When the logos, the long-lasting Western centrality of the word, seems to evaporate before our eyes, and the characteristic Western conception of self and society with it? Ouch. I actually would make more of a case that the Internet has revived writing in a TV age, but again, I can't argue with the literacy tests and the tripe I've seen on the Web today. Back to reverence and words--when there are fewer words we value them more. In Augustine's day, books were so scarce and costly that they came with no spaces between words and paragraphs; owning a book was like owning a Mercedes. Today I can walk into any number of Bargain Books outlets and scoop up any number of nonsensical titles for $3.98. I can buy the New York Times for a buck. With spaces between the words. But when words hit the Web, and appear and disappear like lightning, they have almost zero value, they hardly exist at all. We have gone from reverence to hardly noticing. In Quentin Schultze's aforementioned upcoming book, he mentions how Vaschlav Havel came to value reading and writing while a political prisoner in Europe. He was allowed only four pages of written correspondence each week, with the threat of censorship and no promise that they would ever be delivered. Havel writes that he came to treasure each word on each page; he realized what a gift communication was. The danger of blogging is that the easy ability to do it endlessly means we stop caring about words themselves; and judging from many blogs I've seen today, that is exactly what has happened.
This is how I put it to a friend earlier this week in an e-mail: "Words in cyberspace are ephemeral, fleeting, and nonexistent at the push of a button, whereas they were held, pre-Gutenberg, in reverence, and ever since, words on paper have been enduring, anchored on the page, held in the hand." This notion of the divinity of the word is intriguing to me. Getting back to the staggering volume of words in the age of the blog, it certainly is exponentially more difficult to think of words as sacred or even slightly special when they are so cheap and so plentiful. I'm not saying we should return to the age of deifying words and reserving them for the elite, but cherishing words is an idea I would hope is retained in this century. I suppose some would want to read all sorts of spiritual things into the fact that the founder of Blogathon is an athiest, who posts athiest news headlines at her blog (it turns out she's very sweet to talk to), and although I'm a firm believer in God (it seems to me it takes incredible faith to be an athiest), I'm going to call off those dogs. Here it is the dead of night and I'm talking about the spiritual side of blogging... back to longtime blogger and word treasurer James Lileks to steer us back on course, from an e-mail reply to my question about the McDonald-ization of writing a couple years ago.
This is the golden age of text. More words fly over the net in the course of a day than were published in the entire 19th century. (Rough guess, unscientific.) The level of disquisition isn't great, but for one glorious moment in human history millions of people are banging out millions of words every day and millions of people are reading them. Most of those words, of course, seem to be an effort to prove correct the million-monkeys-typing-Shakespeare-by-accident theory, but if I can judge from the scrawls on the back of my substantial old postcard collection, people have been committing drivel for a long, long time. Chat rooms are nothing but bilge pumps. E-mail is as good as the sender. Web pages permit the publication & dissemination of ideas and projects that would have languished unread just 15 years ago. On balance: it's good. Of course, I ate at McDonald's today, so that should tell you something. From On Literacy, an engaging sociological history of literacy, even if it doesn't pierce right to my question of the ontological nature and technological elasticity of words (what is this, 3 in the morning?) Philosophers of the ancient world and the early Church evolved the celebrated Logos doctrine, best known from the opening verses of the gospel according to St. John: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Many volumes have been written to explicate the word Logos, but the translation of the Authorized Version is entirely apt. In the Logos doctrine, God is not merely thought to be like language in its most sublime sense, he is equated with it.
Words were worshiped, then, throughout history, for their indirectly or directly divine nature. Perhaps this is what contributed to the sad legacy of written words being the privilege of the elite--the church, the government, the few educated--for centuries. The average person throughout human history, until the 20th, simply did not encounter many words on a daily basis.
This is why my magazine editor in New York I talked to last summer said the bemoaning of the state of reading in an MTV age is off the mark--only very recently in history has mass literacy been the norm; before that people used speech, song and images to communicate. So do people today. So what's the problem? I knew I'd be thinking about this topic of the future of words, so I went to the library this week. I used to love libraries as a kid--the sweaty smell of books idling on endless shelves, the hushed tones that made it feel like a church, the promise of new ideas bouncing off the shelves at you. Being back in a library -- and the massive Washington Library in the Loop, no less -- was an anchoring experience for this word hound. All the shelves, all the words, all the wisdom and history; every writer should spend time in such surroundings to be humbled by them. Here's what I found for the topic of the day: The Psychology of Literacy by Silvia Scribner and Michael Cole, On Literacy by Robert Pattison, Literacy Online by Myron Tuman, Writing Space by Jay David Bolter, and The Electronic Word by Richard Latham. Tidbits of their wisdom, yanked from the page to the screen, to come. As you read, keep in mind the current issue of the transition in medium and what it means for the word (holy cow, I just sounded like a professor or something).
First, from the Psychology of Literacy:
Socrates pointed out that ... letters might weaken memories and lead to forgetfulness, as learners came to rely on external aids for reminiscence. ... Socrates feared that the discovery of the written word would have the show of wisdom (they would know the letters) without the reality (they would not necessarily grasp the true ideas).
Resonant words in a new rhetorical age. I'm staring to feel weak--I'm running on pizza, macaroni and cheese, cookies, and licorice--just writing that makes me feel a little queasy. I've got to do some writing ahead and start taking 28 minute naps. But I have so much left to write about! This words and waste question unfurls a deeper question about the fundamental nature of words in a digital age. How do words themselves, and our relationship with them, evolve with new technology? For centuries, scrawlings on paper have represented words as a steady medium. Only in the last few years have printed representations of words become a new life form--a form that instantly appears as a byte on a screen, a flash of light, and can evaporate every bit as instantly with the stroke of a key. (Remember the old typewriters, with the arms that would leap up to slather a letter onto a page? WordPerfect makes it look like a quill and ink.) The question is, what does that do to words and how we see them and interact with them? This article from the Tribune late last year is a good, but very limited start:
As I've said, the most mind-boggling thing about this whole exercise is the sheer scope of blogging. There are hundreds of thousands of blogs out there, hundreds of millions, maybe billions of words. Today alone I will write about 10,000 words in this weblog. The volume of the blogosphere is enough to alphabetically suffocate the brain (that's right, alpha-bytes). Just imagine sitting in front of Weblogs.com all day, with its up-to-the-minute listing of recently updated blogs, and reading everything that is posted. It's a recipe for insanity. That we can make any sense of all of this sea is staggering. This question of the volume of information in a digital age reminds me of an intriguing piece in the Washington Post a couple years ago on the Library of Congress and its struggle to cope with the mass of data being force-fed down its throat. In some cases preservation or mere retention of data means converting from some delicate physical storage to digital bytes. The mass seems to be too much for the maw.
I fished out the file and put it up at my file site:
I think I'm catching my second wind. I don't feel that sleepy and my fingers haven't fallen off yet; they're still tapping away at my laptop as fluidly as they were 10 hours ago. Back to words and waste, technology and wisdom: Tech expert David Gelernter on the perils of imagining the Internet will solve school's problems: The Internet, said President Clinton in February, "could make it possible for every child with access to a computer to stretch a hand across a keyboard to reach every book ever written, every painting ever painted, every symphony ever composed." Pardon me, Mr. President, but this is demented. Most American children don't know what a symphony is. If we suddenly figured out how to teach each child one movement of one symphony, that would be a miracle…It's as if the Administration were announcing that every child must have the fanciest scuba gear on the market - but these kids don't know how to swim, and fitting them out with scuba gear isn't just useless, it's irresponsible; they'll drown.
Instapundit, writing the other day about another blogger with a huge following, the fascinating James Lileks. Gives you an idea what kind of pressure readers put these big bloggers under: LILEKS, as usual, says it best: "As much as I feel guilty about light bleatage, I've always thought that the phrase "blogging will be light today" is akin to saying "the free ice cream cones will be 27 percent smaller today." It's still free ice cream."
I just got done watching Rain Man with my wife, what a powerful but unsatisfying movie (the ending seems incomplete, seemingly deliberately). I'd never seen it before. One of the all-time great acting performances from Dustin Hoffman as the autistic and alien but unthreatening Ray, and Tom Cruise stretches to portray a glimmer of change in the snotty Charlie--it's convincing (but only because we want Tom to settle down and stop whining?) The scene with the pancakes at the end is classic; the scene in the doctor's office helps re-write the definition of what human love can be. I picked a good one to help melt away the countdown to 8 a.m. You may have wondered, why do I insist on proper caps, punctuation, and the whole deal? And why have I been writing out URL's completely at the bottom of posts? (OK, you may not have wondered that at all, but I wanted to explain it.) There's no rule that says that just because it's the Internet, it has to be lower case, poor punctuation and spelling. Part of it is just the journalist and grammar nut in me, part of it is an attempt to bring some more structure to an often unstructured format. As for the URL's, I like to see what I'm linking to before I go there, and the structure of the tree of a URL is often helpful in seeing what kind of site it may be (front page? main sub-page? random article?) When words are simply highlighted throughout a paragraph, you aren't telling the reader where you're going and why. (I've succumbed to that recently today simply because writing out all the links would bog down the blog. [I just wrote "blog down the bog." Must be after midnight.]) For the most part, it's been fun though. And I'm not even done ranting about blogs and the future of words... I may have come across as a little snide about blogs below--yes, I appreciate the irony in talking about blogs in a blog, but my (and Schultze's) point about trying to add to discourse can still hold water--it's been tough trying to carry out Blogathon and spending a day at home with my wife--with AOL plodding along on my dialup, and I feel this obligation to the screen at the expense of this real person next to me. Flesh instead of bytes, that's a workable priority order for me. |
