Good Luck with That Strategy

The Pioneer Press recently started running political coverage/analysis from a website called politico.com, which appears to be a startup by a bunch of mainstream journalists from the Washington Post, Time, and USA Today, among other print media.

In one recent story run in the PiPress on February 27, writer David Paul Kuhn recounted how the GOP is strategizing to run against a black or woman candidate... so that they won't be perceived as racist or sexist.

Everyone is being careful with a capital C not to fall into what they call "undisciplined messaging." So I thought it was funny, or sad, or possibly ironic that a Republican spokeswoman expressed the new strategy this way:

"Republicans will need to exercise less deafness and more deftness in dealing with a different-looking candidate, whether it is a woman or a black man."

Hmmm. Catchy play on words.

But it's a good thing the candidate they're running against isn't deaf! Or they could be in hot water already.

Ads on the Front Page

Was anyone else disturbed by this unusual notice included on the top left of the front page of the Sunday Star Tribune (February 24, 2008)?

Gosh, you mean there are up to $150 in coupon savings in the newspaper? Guess I should buy one, since that's the only reason to pay good money for a bunch of paper. I'd never want to pay for a newspaper just to read the news.

Guess they're still trying to figure out how to "monetize" the newspaper business model at this late date.

Wendell Berry

Okay, so I've been reading Wendell Barry's collection of essays, What Are People For?

I'm hoping to gather the mental energy to discuss his many ideas. But in the meantime, here are some quotes I found particularly compelling.

...in unlimited economic competition, the winners are losers; that they may appear to be winners is owing only to their temporary ability to charge their costs to other people or to nature. From "Economy and Pleasure," 1988

[For women t]o have an equal part in our juggernaut of national vandalism is to be a vandal. To call this vandalism "liberation" is to prolong, and even ratify, a dangerous confusion that was once principally masculine. From "Feminism, the Body, and the Machine," 1989

We must achieve the character and acquire the skills to live much poorer than we do. We must waste less. We must do more for ourselves and each other.... The great obstacle is simply this: the conviction that we cannot change because we are dependent on what is wrong. But that is the addict's excuse, and we know that it will not do. From "Word and Flesh," 1989

A sense of justice, though essential, grows pale and cynical when it stands too long alone in the face of overpowering injustice. From "Harry Caudill in the Cumberlands," 1981

In writing of Edward Abbey, Berry wrote, "He is prejudiced against sacred cows, the favorite pets of tyrants." From "A Few words in Favor of Edward Abbey," 1985

Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence. From "A Poem of Difficult Hope," 1990

Berry was writing these essays in the 1980s and earlier about issues that have been popularized of late by Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma and Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Vegetable Miracle. Wish I had read him sooner.

More Anti-Purse Propaganda

Here are a few more entries in my campaign to discourage purses.

As you may recall, these messages are part of the national security effort to guarantee that our National IDs don't fall into the wrong hands.

Because they are pocketless, women are more likely than men to lose their IDs or have them stolen. And it's all because of their insistence on carrying essential national security documents in their hopelessly nonsecure purses.

See my earlier full explanation.

Raked Over

I'm beginning to think my blog is cursed. I write about Phyllis Whitney, and a month later she dies. I write about how much I like the Rake magazine, and a month later it suspends publication.

Citing declining ad revenue, the quirky, writing-driven monthly called it quits today. The owners hadn't turned a profit in a couple of years and they couldn't see a change for the better in the current market for advertising dollars.

They say it will continue as a website (and it's a nice website) but basically without new original content, just restaurant and entertainment listings. Oh yeah -- and blogs. Guess those are original content.

Unintended Consequences of National ID

Bruce Schneier, a Minneapolis computer security specialist, had a concise critique of the idea of a national ID system in today's Star Tribune op-ed section. The problems he identified were:

• An "unforgeable" card is an impossibility.
• Through bribery or bootstrapping by using other forged documents, real national ID cards will be acquired by "bad guys."
• People will lose their cards. And here Schneier revealed that "20 percent of all identity documents are lost per year." Guess who will find at least some of them...the "bad guys."
  
• The people who check IDs will make mistakes. He points out, "It's not simply a matter of training; checking IDs is a mind-numbingly boring task, one that is guaranteed to have failures."

And, of course, the kicker: Any national ID system would require a nicely centralized database, just waiting to be hacked by outsiders or insiders.

The one fact in all those bullet points that really got my attention was that 20 percent of identity documents are lost each year. I'd be willing to bet that a disproportionate number of those (either lost or stolen, I imagine) belong to women rather than men. You know, because men generally carry their wallets in their pockets, while women carry theirs inside purses.

So to do my part, and to pave the way for the national ID, I thought I would design a public service campaign to urge women to give up their purses for the sake of national security.

Here are the first of what I hope will be a long line of compelling propaganda messages on behalf of our nation.




More later.

Bad Hyphens

Over the years, one example of media weirdness (and bad technology) I've noticed is what we typographers call "bad hyphens." Typesetting systems and layout programs make decisions on where to hyphenate words at the end of a line, based on a set of rules about how many letters to leave before or after the hyphen.

What they don't deal with quite so well are compound words and technological neologisms.

I've been on the lookout for bad hyphens in my daily newspapers. I decided not to go out of my way to find them -- but when I see one in a story, I set it aside. It's actually amazing there aren't more of them.

I finally have three, which seems like enough to warrant a post, so here goes:

Star Tribune, January 21, 2008, in an AP story about Hugo Chavez threatening to nationalize farms "if owners refuse to sell their milk for domestic consumption and instead seek higher profits abroad or from chee-semakers."

I had to read that one twice before I figured out what the story meant to say, wondering what a "semaker" was. Let alone a "chee."

Star Tribune, February 10, 2008, in a local letter to the editor about substitute teachers in the Minneapolis public schools: "The Aesopon-line website, which the Minneapolis schools use..."

I guess they're referring to a website called Aesop [pause] online... which calls to mind the constant struggle faced by anyone who has to typeset web addresses. The darn things are long and full of words run together.

My general rule is to break them manually at a spot between two "words," in a place that that will read naturally. And to never use a hyphen, since readers who may type the URL into their browsers will have no way of knowing if the hyphen is actually part of the address or not.

Star Tribune, February 24, 2008, in today's offering by conservative columnist Katherine Kersten, quoting an anti-pornography activist: " 'And now they've figured out how to get onto your cell phone, and your iP-od,' he adds."

Oh, so that's how you say it -- ip - od! Thanks, Katherine.

Euan Kerr, Forever Young

This morning I was (sort of) listening to the pledge drive on Minnesota Public Radio. Our local Scotsman of the airwaves Euan Kerr was on doing the fund-raising song and dance, and happened to mention that he was up north visiting his child at college recently.

HE HAS A CHILD IN COLLEGE???? I thought, and, yes, it was in in all caps.

I first heard his voice back in the 1980s, not long after I moved to Minnesota, when (I believe) he was an intern at MPR. So in my mind, he will always be young, and therefore can't have a child in college.

If you haven't been lucky enough to hear his voice (and you've got your audio plugin ducks in a row), you can listen in on one of his recent stories here.

Words I Hate

I'm sure there are others, but here is my first attempt at a list of words or phrases I dislike intensely. I will add new posts on this topic as they occur to me.

Some are pretentious, and some are just plain over-used:

• Enhance -- why not just say improve?
  
• Opine -- a guy I knew at my student newspaper used to use this in news stories as an alternate to "said." It always drove me crazy, and I was only 22 then. Not nearly as cranky as I am now.
  
• Nestled -- every bed and breakfast in a rural setting is nestled. Have you ever noticed that?
  
• Amidst -- Does it really need those last two consonants? Or what about just using "among" -- not fancy enough, I suppose. And not "amongst" either, although that one doesn't bother me as much.
  
• "A wealth of" -- puffery, I say!
  
• A host of -- more puffery! I suppose I should add "plethora of" and the frequently misused "myriad of." Why is this construction so common? Why are so many of us trying to say the equivalent of "a lot of" ?
  

Now, let's see if I can use them all in a single sentence.

"I'm looking for a quaint home, nestled amidst a wealth of oak trees and blessed with a host of high-end features," the overpaid CEO opined.

Gee, I didn't set out to write Realtor® speak, but that's what it became without the least bit of effort. Interesting.

There Oughta Be a Word

Regarding my earlier post on the ease of misreading the name Arial -- the blog Ironic Sans has coined a word to describe that phenomenon.

Gosh, there's nothing like a good neologism.

That's Using Your Noodle... I Guess

I know that advertising is supposed to be interruptive, but here's an example where the ad interrupted me only so I could ridicule it, its product and the company that makes it.

What could they possibly have been thinking? Why would this concept do anything to sell pasta? Do you think they paid the agency for this? (Or is the agency laughing at the client behind their backs?)

The basic premise is that the product is fortified with fiber and calcium, so you're smarter if you eat it... or it makes you smarter... or maybe you'll turn into a giant piece of rotini if you dare to partake.

I can only speculate that the art director is a fan of The Tick comics, and is hoping that there's a casting call for a new villain: Pastaface Puccini, who can out-cook the other villains (like Chairface Chippendale, shown at right).

P.S. -- And what's with the undersized, ultra-fakey feet? Couldn't it just be wearing shoes?

Lincoln Spotting

This morning, NPR reporter Kitty Eisele told the story of going to the Library of Congress to see the newly discovered photographs of Lincoln's second inagural. They had been misfiled in the folders alloted to U.S. Grant.

Eisele worked with Ken Burns on the Civil War documentary, so she had spent months in the LoC photo files at an earlier point in her life. Returning to see a new glimpse of history was obviously inspiring to her. She shared her impressions of the photos, grounded in her knowledge of the time, and it was just a little bit like being at the inauguration.

How did the photos happen to get found? Well, the LoC has loaded its photo archive to the web now. So a researcher who was looking through the Grant files found the Lincoln photos.

A New Meaning to Horse Hair

What do you get when you cross a Bratz doll with a horse?

A Struts doll, I guess.

It's ads and products like this that make me wonder if the end times aren't near after all.

Check out the platform shoes and handbags -- handbags, for Freia's sake, these mares are sporting handbags. (Of course, they're wearing clothes, as well, decked out in lace.) Earrings and ankle bracelets, too.


This is the point where I get all emotional about the hyper-feminization inherent in these designs, and point out the thinness and length of the horses' legs. A girl can't even be interested in horses without being reminded of what her body's supposed to look like. These "oh-so-glam new models" have even got the "bashful knee bend" made famous by Erving Goffman in his classic book, Gender Advertisements.

Almost too depressing to contemplate: The company that makes these probably "tested" them on kids and found that they would sell. Hence, the full-page, back-cover ad buy in Nickelodeon magazine.

I was pinning my hopes on the fact that the product is made by a company I've never heard of: "Playmates" (I wonder if they drew their inspiration from the original definition or the Playboy version?). I thought that might mean they'd go out of business fast if the product doesn't sell.

But, unfortunately, a quick search told me that Playmates is a 42-year-old, Hong Kong-based company. They were responsible for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle dolls of the 1980s, which I believe was one of the earliest examples of preemptive toy-cartoon integration (where the toy existed before or at the same time as the show, contrasted with earlier examples where the show came first, then inspired the toy).

We used to be outraged about that, if I remember correctly. But now it's just business as usual. And you don't even need to make a television show any more, anyway. All you need is a web site.

Phyllis Whitney Dies at age 104

I've written here before about writer Phyllis Whitney's historical novels for juveniles.

Whitney died yesterday after a brief illness. She had published her last book in 1997 at the age of 94. Sounds like she was a role model in more ways than one!

The official Phyllis Whitney website features a great page with the original covers of all her juvenile titles, with links to their synopses. Guess I have some catching up to do!

Thanks, Phyllis.

Scrambled Letters

Back in the mid-80s I worked with an organization in Washington, D.C., called the Association to Unite the Democracies. Darned if I didn't almost always type the name like this by mistake: Association to Untie the Democracies. (It wasn't until a few years later that I heard that amusing play on Karl Marx -- Bad spellers of the world, untie!)

Since then I've run across other scrambles that unintentionally juxtapose the meanings of words. Here are a few more:

• Sacred vs. scared
  
• Profile vs. prolife
  
• Conversation vs. conservation
  
• Feeling vs. fleeing
• Prenatal vs. parental

I found a nice list of these at a site belonging to a guy named Doug Hyte. He calls them jumbles, which is a good name. Doug has played a bit of Scrabble in his life, I'd guess.

This Year's Model

Recently, I wondered aloud to a friend if the success of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as mainstream candidates might be partly attributable to the fictional TV example set by Geena Davis on Commander in Chief and Dennis Haysbert on 24.



It stood to reason, I said, that seeing a white woman or a black man as president, even in a fictional show, brought it into the realm of possibility.


"Well," said my friend, "there's lots of evidence that product placement works, you know."

Signs of Last Summer

Sign on what used to be the largest employer within the village limits of my home town.

Got to keep people out of the vacant factory.

Super graphics for Super Tire Services.

Sign on the wall of the antique store that was once a sewing factory where my grandmother worked.

Don't know what this means.

 

Into the Mouths of Babes

So now babies need their own water brand, eh?

Do you think there's a blue label for the boy infants? Or maybe there's one with each individual child's name on it.

The Pile Is Bigger!

I just realized that my pile of newspaper and other clippings is actually bigger since I started this blog.

So much for the theory that it would help me get rid of stuff.

Things I'm currently saving to add to the blog when there are enough of them:

• Bad hyphenations from print media
  
• A bunch of (mis)information examples about statistical likelihood in medical reporting
• Reviews of a couple of books I've been reading
• Examples of sexist language in newspapers (geez, there just isn't enough of it every day -- it's not accumulating fast enough!)

I'll get to it all soon, I hope.

New Job

This morning on Minnesota Public Radio, they had one of those technical glitches where the national feed begins before the local material gets started. So this is what I heard:

"Democrat Hillary Clinton" [fade out]

[fade in] delivering women's pajamas in designer hat boxes at PajamaGram.com."

Good to know Public Radio has something in mind for Hillary if the current job search doesn't work out.

Cause and Effect of the Family Dinner

Heard a great story on NPR the other day, deconstructing research about the "effects" of the family dinner on children (Thursday, February 7).

Reporter Alix Spiegel laid out the findings of the research we've all heard about in the media: that having dinner regularly with family protects teens from getting into drugs, alcohol, and early sex, that it leads to earlier reading in young kids, and so on. Having grown up having dinner with my family, and replicating it myself in my own household for the most part, I've hoped that this is true, but wondered how it worked exactly.

Well, others wondered, too, and some have done additional research. And it turns out that it's not dinner itself that "causes" these good effects. It's actually more of a correlation.

Sometimes it's the conversation the families have -- asking each other with genuine interest how the day was, in the case of the teen effects, or using the time to tell stories and explain words and concepts, in the case of effects on younger kids' reading.

The fact that a family can be organized enough to get dinner together on a regular basis in the first place was key as well. The reporter summarized this point to one of the experts by saying, more or less: So a dysfunctional family would stop being a dysfunctional family if they could organize a family dinner? And the expert had to agree that, yes, that was true.

Repeat after me: Correlation is not causation.

Russel Wright and the Modesty of Good Design

Quite honestly, I had never heard of Russel Wright, but I knew his work when I saw it. The most familiar items were the Melmac dishes, followed by the spun aluminum pieces.

A new exhibition of his work just opened at the Goldstein Gallery at the University of Minnesota St. Paul campus. It's definitely worth a visit. Here are some photos.


A sectional sofa. Not sure how many of these had been designed before Wright did this one.


Ceramic clocks with raised numbers.


Fabrics from among the collection shown in the exhibit.


Wright's American Modern line of dishware is showcased on a picnic table which looks, as the exhibit book says, "as it may have appeared on the outdoor patio of Wright's home and studio on East 48th Street in New York."


Wine carafes (left) and a coffee pot from the American Modern line. Those wine carafes are so funky!


Melmac dishes, originally introduced in 1953, won MoMA's Good Design Award.

Also of note was the fact that Wright traveled to Japan in the 1950s and was very influential on Japanese industrial and product design, helping to change what had until then been a negative association with the phrase "Made in Japan."

The photos and plans for Wright's house in Garrison, New York, were inspiring. Named Manitoga, the land on which it stands was once a stone quarry, until Wright changed it into a Japanese-influenced natural woodland. The house itself is both modernist and Japanese in style. I'd like to go visit it one day, but until then I'll have to content myself with a visit to the website of the Russel Wright Center, which is housed at Manitoga.

For more on the Russel Wright exhibit (with photos of the full exhibit from its other venues) see livingwithgooddesign.org.

Space for All the Dead

For the last year, the Los Angeles Times has included a blog called Homicide Report on its website. It recounts the names and details of every person murdered in LA County. Before crime reporter Jill Leovy convinced her editors to let her start the report, only 10 percent of LA's murders showed up in the paper's print edition.

Leovy noticed the deaths that got literal ink were the unusual ones -- women, babies, celebrities, white people. Young black or Chicano men went unmentioned because they were just too numerous. As she wrote in her summary article that appeared in the February 4 Times, "Thirteen-year-old boys nearly always made the headines of the Times' print edition, but 14-year-olds were a toss-up. Sixteen- and 17-year-olds were more likely to make the cut if they were girls."

As the parent of a 14-year-old, I found that particularly chilling. Almost 1,000 people die by homicide each year in LA county (down from earlier years, believe it or not), but the vast majority never made the paper. When Leovy began asking for details on each death, she sometimes found police press officers who were "surprised to learn that victims' names were public information. No reporter had ever asked" for them before.

"The Web offered what the paper did not: unlimited space," Leovy wrote. "The Homicide Report made no distinction between a celebrity and transient. Each got the same typeface, the same kind of write-up."

In the same way that the New York Times' inclusion of every name of every person who died in the World Trade Center helped to make the victims' lives real, the Homicide Report sheds light on lives that ended in what Leovy called "a pocket epidemic of violent death among black and Latino men, pooling in neglected corners of society."

Sugar Explosion -- Much Less than Perfect

A few days ago, there was an explosion and fire in a sugar refinery near Savannah, Georgia. Killed at least four people, probably eight.

As anyone knows who has been to the Mill City Museum in Minneapolis, suspended dust particles (released when producing foods like flour or sugar) are easily combustible. The flour mills of Minneapolis were destroyed and rebuilt numerous times, until their owners installed dust scrubbers to remove the dust from the air.

If memory serves from my tour at the museum, that change was made at least 50 years ago. Yet in 2008 we have a sugar dust fire in the American South, in part because OSHA has never adopted regulations to prevent dust explosions in sugar mills. According to the AP, "In the past 28 years, about 300 dust explosions have killed more than 120 workers and injured several hundred others. Most are preventable by removing dust as it builds up..."

So with that outrage as context, check out this information graphic from today's Star Tribune, which accompanied the AP story. The graphic is placed adjacent to the story quoted above -- the one that says there have been 300 explosions in less than 30 years (that's over 10 per year on average) -- but the graphic is headlined "Perfect Storm Needed for Dust Blast."


Ummmm ... no. Last time I checked, a "perfect storm," even though greatly overused, still meant a combination of unrelated events that form an unusually catastrophic environmental result. Not something that happens once a year, let alone ten times a year. This is less like a perfect storm and more like a chemical reaction that occurs the same way time after time until the conditions change.

But maybe the most disturbing thing about this disaster is that I don't recall hearing a word about the other 299 explosions or 100+ people killed over the last 30 years.

F Minus

Tony Carrillo's "F Minus" one-panel comic has been in the Star Tribune for a year or two now.

I have to admit there are a few strips I just don't get, but for the most part they are amusing and often extremely funny. If you're not lucky enough to have it in your newspaper, you can check out the daily strip at his website. Carrillo got his contract with United Features Syndicate by winning a national contest that was judged by Dilbert's Scott Adams.

Carrillo's site says, "After years of studying fine art and classical drawing, Tony resorted back to the simple, yet stupid doodles that used to get him in trouble in the third grade." Maybe that's why I like it!

He also has a blog, called Spread the F Word.

Ethanol - Get It Off the Corn Diet

More evidence indicating that corn-based ethanol isn't the key to solving global warming.

Not only does it take a lot of energy to produce it in the first place, and cause fertilizer runoff that leads to state-sized algae blooms in the Gulf of Mexico, but now University of Minnesota researchers have found (in a Feb. 7 article published in Science) that it actually contributes to global warming.

That's right. When farmers around the world cut down trees or clear grass- and peat-lands to plant corn for ethanol (or soybeans for biodiesel), it creates more carbon dioxide than is saved by the decreased emissions from the biofuels.

And before you think this is a South American or Malaysian problem ("they shouldn't cut down their rain forests, tsk tsk") remember that American farmers are increasingly plowing under land that they had set aside for conservation to take advantage of the increased prices on corn. According to today's Star Tribune, "The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated that in Minnesota, Iowa, North Dakota and South Dakota, about 750,000 acres of conservation grasslands were converted to crops last year..." A second study at Iowa State University (also published in Science) found that corn-based ethanol could double greenhouse gas emissions in the next three decades.

Makes you wonder what the Freakonomics guy would say about all this.

Power from the People

I know I read a little too much science fiction, but I loved the sound of this one: Some Canadian researchers have figured out a way to capture the kinetic energy generated from walking to create electricity.

Right now it's limited to powering something on the body of the walker, such as a cell phone charger or insulin pump, but I can't help imagining some way to store the energy. Picture it: we all wear these things, store the electricity in batteries, and every night dump that day's generated electricity to the grid for a discount on our electric bills. And a resulting decrease in need for coal or other new power plants.

A girl's gotta dream.

Full story at the New York Times.

Funny Guy

Perhaps this post would make more sense under "images at play" than words at play, but David Steinlicht gives an amusing analysis of this election sign, among many other interesting photos of our modern world, on his blog, davidsteinlicht.blogspot.com.

He also presents his comics at allsmall.net and cornercomic.com and shares his love of a peculiarly Midwestern art form at cropart.com.

Thanks for all the smiles, David.

Flip of the Tongue, Part 3

The flips just keep coming. Here are some recent ones that got my attention. (Read the earlier flips here and here.)

Coral singing -- this one was in writing, of course, or I wouldn't have thought anything of it.

Flaw in the ointment -- I hardly noticed this one... it almost sounds correct!

Rod iron -- this can be attributed to the speaker using a term he's only heard, but never seen in writing. Or if he saw it in writing, he didn't realize it was the same thing.

Jumping through red tape -- part of a comment on a discussion forum, and the writer may have been using it ironically. But I still thought it was worth including for the wonderful visual image it provides.

And my personal favorite:

Henry Miller chair -- a friend was telling me that her husband had to have an ergonomic chair at work because of back problems. "They got him a Henry Miller chair," she said. The Herman Miller company might be interested to know that the writer of Tropic of Cancer and lover of Anais Nin is after their market share.

Gas Is "Cheap"... Yeah, Sure

This isn't my usual type of topic for Sucker Born Every Minute, but I felt like a sucker myself in my lack of awareness of the true cost of gas when I read these stats in today's op-ed by Lisa Margonelli called "Five Myths about Greener Energy" (Washington Post, reprinted in the St. Paul Pioneer Press).

We all grumble about $3.00 a gallon gas, but check out these numbers for a shock. For each gallon of gas, we're also paying in hidden costs (through our taxes, health insurance premiums, or increased prices) that are directly attributable to our car addiction:

• $.51 for asthma treatment
• $1.21 for pollution abatement
• $1.39 for defense expenditures (needed to keep our supply of oil available)
• $5.19 for economic costs (increased prices, lost employment and other disruptions caused by sudden changes in the price of oil)

Not even including the costs we could extrapolate for global warming.

These figures are according to Milton Copulos of the National Defense Council Foundation. And the NDCF is no environmental organization... it's a national security organization, founded in 1978 by economists and current and former members of the U.S. military.

Two Jobs for the Price of One

I've pretty much been a fan of The Rake magazine since it first hit the streets... gee, was it over five years ago? I usually read it on a Thursday night at the original Dunn Brothers coffee shop at Snelling and Grand while waiting for my daughter to get out of her art class, which is held around the corner.

Some personal favorites over the years include Eric Dregni's story on his (and his wife's) experience having a baby born while living in Norway, Ann Bauer's essay on her son's multiple misdiagnoses that led to a terrible acceleration of his autism symptoms, and Cory Doctorow's short story "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth," which appeared in one of the fiction issues. (Each of these pieces spent some time in the filing cabinet before I reluctantly consigned it to the recycling pile, because -- as the tagline says -- you can't keep everything.)

A new favorite in the February 2008 issue is by publisher Tom Bartel, titled "Discounting the Value of Work: Working a double shift in a political fantasy land." Here's an excerpt:

As I was checking out at Costco, stocking up on over $100 worth of stuff, the checker mentioned that I sure was using a lot of coupons. The young woman who was reloading my cart as the items came off the scanner said that I was buying a lot of stuff that she needed, too, but she couldn’t afford to use the coupons this week because she was “short.”

The checker offered: “They’re good through next weekend, too.”

“Next week, I’ve got to pay rent,” she replied.

The guy in line behind me was buying a new vacuum cleaner. The cheerful checker kept up the banter: “This must be cleaning supply day,” she said to him as I was signing my credit card slip. “Yeah,” the guy said, “my cleaning lady told me I needed a new vacuum.”

“That’s good,” said the checker. “I’m a cleaning lady too, and I hate it when the vacuum’s no good. My husband and I do it one day a week. He does the downstairs and I do the upstairs.”

Pushing my cart toward the parking lot, I thought of the first George Bush and his amazement at the electronic bar-code scanners when he went through a grocery line during a campaign stop.... the story was used to great effect by his rivals to show how “out of touch” Bush was with quotidian America.

Similar charges could more honestly be leveled at Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who recently said she was proud to be from Minnesota, “where we have more people that are working longer hours, we have people that are working two jobs.” Of course, she’s probably not as proud as George Bush fils, who two years ago told a single mother of three, “You work three jobs? … Uniquely American, isn’t it? I mean, that is fantastic that you’re doing that.”

Never the wordsmith, Bush of course has no idea that “fantastic” doesn’t really mean “great.” It means “beyond rational belief.” What is fantastic is that Bachmann is proud that someone needs a second job in order to have the money to buy discounted shampoo by the gallon....

You'll have to go to the Rake site to read the rest of it. All I can say is, it made me think about my favorite cashier at the grocery store, who has occasionally mentioned his second job delivering the newspaper at 4:00 a.m. the same day that I see him working at 8:30 p.m.

Persepolis

[Photo taken off the screen at Minneapolis' Uptown Theater]

My daughter and I read Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis books a couple of years ago and loved them. We just saw the movie this weekend and it's amazing how true it is to the books without being identical.

Visually it differs from the books in that it is not just black and white line art -- the backgrounds are filled with textural grays and patterns. There are some scenes I don't recall from the books, such as the one where the child Marjane and her grandmother go to see a Godzilla movie.

But it brings across the feeling and all of the historical details from the book. I came away amazed that, while I remember the Iranian revolution and the "Iran Hostage Crisis" of the late 1970s clearly, I have almost no recollection of the bloody Iran-Iraq war that followed, and that plays such a central role in Persepolis and in Satrapi's life. When Marjane and her family emerge from their building after a bombing raid, only to find gaping holes in some buildings and others in complete ruins, I learned more about that war than I did from anything I heard contemporaneously.

I guess that war wasn't "news" in the U.S. in the 1980s.

Nice to Know You

Jeff Opdyke, who writes the “Love & Money” column in the Wall Street Journal, is familiar with sharing details about his personal life in his writing. That's part of the point of his column – to personalize the many decisions that arise for an American family around saving, spending, raising kids, buying a house, using credit cards.

In a recent column, Opdyke described his reaction to his grandmother’s request that he give her several hundred dollars. He related that his grandmother had raised him, and so is more like a mother than a grandmother to him. He was very honest in describing his mixed feelings about her request – he knows that she doesn’t “need” the money to survive, but rather to let her maintain the lifestyle she’s used to, which includes treating her friends to meals out and parties. Despite this, he concluded that he would give her the money anyway.

His readers’ reactions were swift and virulent, including insults (“You insufferable twit” and "selfish, self-indulged, petty, controlling" were just a few of the printable ones, I imagine).

The exchange was provocative, but what it made me think about was the pitfalls inherent in sharing your personal thoughts in a public medium, whether in a newspaper column like Opdyke’s or a blog like this one.

Former Pioneer Press columnist Laura Billings would occasionally write stories that gave glimpses of her mailbag, and it was disturbing. I think that was the first time I realized how hard it must be to share what you think with the public – most of the time, you don’t hear from the reasonable middle, but only from the whacko extremes.

Writing about myself and my opinions for a public audience (no matter how few of you there are!) is similar to journaling, except for the fact that I’m not the only one who reads it. This affects what I write about, and what I choose to say. Whether I’m considering what my mother would think, or a friend, or some person I don’t know, it affects my words.

At the same time, when I read someone else’s thoughts, it’s hard not to feel like I know that person to some extent, even if it’s a complete stranger. It’s similar to our celebrity culture – when we watch an actor in a movie, or a musician performing, our modern media erase the space between us so that we feel as if we are there. (The same effect happens when a child is snatched – it’s all too easy to identify and extrapolate that experience to your own child.)

I suppose this situation began with the invention of writing, which allowed one person to read something written by another without ever meeting. The printing press accelerated it, allowing for wider distribution of writings. The telegraph and then modern mass media broke the space barrier – words could be moved across distance without having to be attached to a physical medium that required transportation. Moving images in film and television made it more vivid than words alone could. And, of course, the interweb has taken it to its current (and constantly changing) level, allowing for instant response through comments, trackbacks, diggs, and so on.

But of course I don’t know the person whose words I read. I’ll never meet the celebrity I see on David Letterman. It’s not my child that was taken.

Our human brains are wired to know a relatively small group of “us” so that we can be ready to defend ourselves against a threatening “them.” Yet we live in an age where our “us” includes people we’ll never actually know, and our “them” includes people in our towns or neighborhoods whom we could know, but don’t have time for because we’re too busy watching TV or surfing the interweb.

Make It Bigger!

From the Source section of today's Star Tribune. Gee, I love editing errors when they're in 72-point type!

Perhaps the headline writer was thinking it stood for "Do Yourself In" rather than "Do It Yourself."

Why Newspapers Are Dying

The Rogue Columnist writes about What's Really Wrong with Newspapers and concludes that it has less to do with new media and a changing economy than it does with centralization, lack of competition and an inherently bad business model that was ripe to be pushed aside.

Having to witness both of my local newspapers slash their staffing in the past few years has been painful -- almost like watching friends die.

The only good thing to come out of it is that many of these former newsmen and women are going on to work for nonprofits and new media where their skills are badly needed. I'll be writing more about the Newpaper Diaspora in future posts.

Bedroom Moments with Weekend Edition Saturday

NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday has been just outstanding lately. Every story is interesting -- the darn show makes me stay in my bedroom so long, waiting to hear the next story, that it's not even breakfast time anymore when I get downstairs.

Today's highlights were:

• Symphonic Forensics: Alsop's 'CSI Beethoven', about a collaborative performance between Marin Alsop (and her Baltimore Symphony Orchestra) and a Johns Hopkins otolaryngologist. It included lots of details about what caused Beethoven's deafness, what he may have died from, and played recordings of how Beethoven's music would have sounded to him at different stages of his increasing loss of hearing.
  
• Capturing Cell Phone-Only Users in Political Polls -- The Pew Research Center finally answered my nagging question about whether the increasing incidence of younger people not having "land" phone lines will affect political polling results.
  
• BBC Comedy Hit Heads to U.S. -- I haven't heard of the show, That Mitchell and Webb Look, but found its creators very funny.
• 'Salesman' Willy Loman: A Towering Little Man -- Just a great story you wouldn't hear anywhere else, looking at an archetypal character of American theater.
  
• Costa Rica's Señor Scissorhands -- Reporter John Burnett's notebook piece about a topiary garden in Central America. Its creator spends all of his time working on the topiaries: "It's so much, it takes a month to trim them all," he says, "and when I'm finished, it's time to start over." Great pictures on the website, too.
  
• A Tragedy in Baghdad -- A moving essay by Scott Simon about yesterday's bombings in Baghdad's pet markets, in which two mentally disabled women were used as bombers.
• Plan Would Nationalize Schools to End Disparities -- I don't read The Atlantic, so this story was a heads-up on a story that proposes funding schools nationally and setting national standards that go beyond No Child Left Behind. The author made the case that local school boards are dysfunctional... and used the fact that the U.S. spends more on education than other industrialized countries (with less to show for it) to back up his claims.
  
• Facebook Backlash: Anti-Social Sites Flourish -- I missed half of this story (you have to shower sometime) but it sounded interesting, covering a new website called Enemybook.

Weekend Edition Saturday has a very high ratio of "driveway moments" -- but in this case, I guess I have to call them "bedroom moments." Teehee.

Whistling Dixie Past a Graveyard

This ad for styrofoam Dixie cups has been running in the local papers of late. You may recognize the cup -- it's become the symbol for takeout coffee on television. (I think I'll start to keep track of each time I see one.)

The purpose of the ad is to encourage caffeine fiends to buy styrofoam cups for their morning brew, rather than using an old-fashioned ceramic cup or a reusable plastic travel mug.

It struck me as both retrograde in terms of its environmental impact and even as just plain odd -- I mean, buying several full-page, four-color ads in a newspaper? To encourage people to ditch their "I heart Grandma" mugs in favor of disposable styrofoam?

This made me wonder what's up at Dixie in these days of reduce-reuse-recycle.

With a little jaunt over to the Wikipedia, I quickly found that Dixie is owned by Koch Industries, the largest privately held company in the world, based on revenue. As I seem to recall from the book, What's the Matter with Kansas?, Koch Industries is based in Wichita, and its top executives (brothers Charles and David Koch) are well-known free marketeers whose family foundation funds the Cato Institute as well as a number of other libertarian and conservative causes.

So I guess it stands to reason that Koch-owned Dixie doesn't believe in global warming or any of that other liberal environmental hoohah. Although one could make the argument that styrofoam cups are actually more environmentally sound than paper -- less pollution output in creating them, more recylable in theory. They don't break down in a landfill, of course, but then, neither does paper in most cases (plus, the paper is coated in a thin film of plastic).

But the key argument is, Why use them at all for your coffee in your own home? Didn't conservative used to have something to do with conserving? And last time I checked, "conserve" was pretty much the opposite of "waste."

(And yes, I know the title of this post is a mixed metaphor.)