Bathroom Books I Know and Love

My family likes to keep books in our bathroom (gee, I hope that's not too much information). They aren't the ones specially published for that purpose, with names like Uncle John's Bathroom Reader. But they do share one trait: they're written in short sections, and so don't have to be read as a coherent whole.

Some favorites from the past: Uncle Cecil's The Straight Dope and its sequels; The Vanishing Hitchhiker and other books about urban legends by Jan Harold Brunvand; Isaac Asimov and Groff Conklin's collection 50 Short Science Fiction Tales (no story is longer than three pages); and They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, and Misleading Attributions by Paul F. Boller Jr.

Our current reading options are both sure to be added to the list of all-time favorites.

After hearing him read on NPR, I couldn't resist picking up a copy of Calvin Trillin's book of rhymes about the 2008 election, Deciding the Next Decider. Graced with an illustration by Barry Blitt (of New Yorker cover fame), the book provides gentle amusement on almost every page.

One of my favorites:

The Nicest Republican

The nice vote goes to Huckabee.
No other is as nice as he.
He leads a decent sort of life.
He's married to his only wife.
His kids, we'd bet, still speak to him.
He's courteous, but isn't prim.
A cheerful fat man who got lean,
He's not vindictive, rude, or mean.
Of course, he thinks our way's been lost:
Abortion is a "holocaust"
And evolution's just a myth.
(The apes are not his kin or kith;
He knows a human couldn't be
Descended from a chimpanzee.)
And what the Bible says is true.
The Earth's not old. It's rather new --
Six thousand years, from Eve to present.
He's wacko, yes, but he's sure pleasant.

And another one:

Patriotism 2008

I backed the war in Nam, okay,
Though I used pull to stay away.
A patriot? But can't you tell?
I wear a flag on my lapel.

My company's now based offshore;
We don't pay taxes anymore.
A patriot? But can't you tell?
I wear a flag on my lapel.

That clean-air stuff's not meant for me.
I drive a German SUV.
A patriot? But can't you tell?
I wear a flag on my lapel.

We needn't build a grand memorial
To patriots. It's all sartorial.

The second book (from the second bathroom) is A Book of Ages by Eric Hanson. Hanson, a Minneapolis-based illustrator and writer, has for years been collecting facts about what happened to any number of the "celebrated dead" at various ages. The result is this deceptively simple book, in which each chapter is an age, filled with short statements of fact about things that happened to specific people at that age.

I confess I've barely started this book (I've just arrived at age 7), but already I've been bemused and amazed. A few excerpts:

At age 3, Ralph Ellison's father dies while delivering ice, 1916. Gore Vidal is the first child to fly across the United States, 1929. His father is the assistant to the general manager of TAT, the first major airline in America.

At age 4, Mick Jagger meets Keith Richards, 1947. Mike Nichols has complications from whooping cough vaccine and loses all his hair, including his eyebrows, 1936. They will never grow back.

At age 5, John Lennon's mother moves in with her new boyfriend, March 1946. The boyfriend doesn't like kids, so John stays on with his aunt Mimi at 251 Menlove Avenue. He is expelled from kindergarten. Flannery O'Connor is photographed by newsreel cameramen with her chicken, which can walk backward, 1930. It is a moment that the writer will later characterize as the high point in her life.

At age 6, Shirley Temple stops believing in Santa Claus when her mother takes her to see him in a department store and Santa asks for her autograph, 1934. Eleanor Roosevelt's family vacation in Europe is spoiled when her father, an opium addict, becomes violent and has to be committed to an asylum, 1891. Truman Capote, whose real name is Truman Streckfus Persons, is living in Monroeville, Alabama, next door to four-year-old Nelle Harper Lee, 1930.

Clearly, there's something for everyone in The Book of Ages -- which makes it a perfect bathroom book.

Preventing Type 2 Diabetes

For today, a letter by Molly Rosenberg of St. Paul in today's Star Tribune:

A Cure for Diabetes: Why Not Also Focus Dollars on Prevention?

I admire the doctors and researchers who are working to find answers and cures for diabetes ("Diabetes cure may be homegrown," Jan. 25). But why don't we hear more about the link between our culture's overprocessed, high-sugar diet and the soaring rates of diabetes?

What if we spent even a fraction of the amount being spent to raise biosecure pigs for transplants and other high-tech projects on nutrition education and helping people access and afford the whole, natural foods that might keep us healthy in the first place? Our health care system should put some focus on prevention, too!

Stilted Advice

Finally, some really useful content in my daily newspaper: Today's Star Tribune reprinted an article from the San Francisco Chronicle on how to walk in 4" stilettos without damaging your body.

A shoe designer named Victor Chu has been promoting a method he worked out after designing shoes for Tommy Hilfiger. One can't help wondering if he's tried it out himself.

Let's just say I'm skeptical about the likelihood of being able to add 4" of height to your heels without unintended consequences. And this article did little to convince me otherwise. It was accompanied by an inane sidebar that attempted to describe the method:

1. Stand tall, as if pulled by a string from the top of your head.
2. Tighten abs by pulling belly button in toward spine, causing weight to shift back to your heels.
3. Walk heel to toe, not on ball of foot.
4. Sway hips slightly to help shift weight to heels.

If you're not clear on how to do all that, despite the helpful list, perhaps this video from YouTube will make it clearer. (That video has been viewed by over 600,000 people.) No? I thought not.

This photo, from a book called X-Ray: See Through the World Around You by Nick Veasey, shows what's happening to the foot while wearing stilettos.

That looks an awful lot like standing on tiptoe to me. And I don't think any amount of belly button pulling or hip swaying is going to change that fact.

Needless to say, I won't hold my breath waiting for the orthopedic doctors to endorse Chu's method.

How to Use Three Words Where One Would Do

I watched Law & Order and most of its spin-offs for a dozen or so years, many of the episodes more than once. As a result, every actor working today looks familiar to me -- because they've all been on Law & Order at least once. (Really. You can check imdb.com if you don't believe me.)

So it was a moment of both recognition and amusement when I saw this post on boingboing.net yesterday. It was originally written to an audience of police, who frequently testify in court cases:

Make up some flash cards. On one side, write a phrase or sentence the way you now talk on the stand. On the other side, write the same phrase in plain English. Have one of your kids work with you with your flash cards. It'll be a nice Hallmark family moment. I'll help you get started.

• He indicated... He said
• I have been employed by... I worked for
• I exited the patrol vehicle... I got out of the car
• I observed... I saw
• I ascertained the location of the residence... I found the house
• I proceeded to the vicinity of... I went to
• I approached the entrance... I went to the door
• The subject approached me... She came up to me
• I apprehended the perpetrator... I arrested the man
• I obtained an item that purported to be an envelope from the individual... I got the envelope from her
• I observed the subject fleeing on foot from the location... I saw him running away

This passage, from a site called officer.com, was written by a woman who trains police. She's trying to get them to use plain English when they testify, because all this verbosity is decreasing their credibility (and, I imagine, their sheer intelligibility) with juries.

Gee, I just love that bit about an "item that purported to be an envelope"!

The Value of an Anachronism

From an op-ed called You Have, in Your Hands, an Anachronism:

Recently, the bureau system of [newspaper] coverage of Washington has collapsed. There is no one to watch the congressional delegations, a mission that once employed Washington reporters who kept their representatives in the light of scrutiny. Twilight has fallen for the news tradition, and with it the transparency of government.

There is no indication that Web-only publishers will generate the kind of wealth that will enable them to replace ailing newspapers. Like radio, the Web favors commentary, not reporting. Opinion cannot be better than the reporting that triggered it.

By Llewellyn King, host of "White House Chronicle" on PBS. Originally written for Hearst Newspapers; reprinted in the Star Tribune on Jan. 24, 2008

Overheard: Edina, Minnesota

A friend of mine was at the Landmark Cinema in Edina, which is showing Slumdog Millionaire, and overheard someone commenting on the film:

"I thought it was cute in a third-world way."

If you've overheard any outrageous, absurdist or intriguing statements lately -- from the random to the ridiculous -- send them my way (daughternumberthree@gmail.com). I'll be keeping my ears open, too.

A Million Hypothermic Humans Witness History

A friend sent me this link to a gigantic photo of the inauguration. Shot by a guy named David Bergman, facing the north side of the speaker podium and extending along the mall, it allows you to zoom in to any spot and see complete detail of the people and activity.

The way you use it is basically the same as the Google Maps interface -- there's an increase/decrease size slider at the left side, and you can move around the image by putting your mouse on the picture and dragging it. (It's a little slow to load the slider, so be patient.)

It's made up of 220 separate photos seamlessly joined together. You can check out Antonin Scalia's hat (he's sitting right behind Obama) -- and notice that Clarence Thomas is either deep in thought or asleep. You can analyze the seating chart (Laura behind George, Michelle in the second row behind Joe Biden). And all from the warm comfort of your home.

Sight for the World

Check out this story from NPR's Weekend Edition, about a retired Oxford professor named Joshua Silver who has developed self-adjusting eyeglasses. He wants to get them into production for $1 a pair so they can be distributed to the 3 billion people in our world who are too poor to afford glasses. (Currently, they cost $19 a pair in limited production.)

As the glasses are adjusted by the wearer, tiny syringes shoot more or less liquid into the lense. Here's how the Guardian described it:

Inside the device's tough plastic lenses are two clear circular sacs filled with fluid, each of which is connected to a small syringe attached to either arm of the spectacles. The wearer adjusts a dial on the syringe to add or reduce amount of fluid in the membrane, thus changing the power of the lens. When the wearer is happy with the strength of each lens the membrane is sealed by twisting a small screw, and the syringes removed. The principle is so simple, the team has discovered, that with very little guidance people are perfectly capable of creating glasses to their own prescription.

Aside from the good news in this story, though, what Silver's work reminds me of is how easy it is to not think about the lives of people you don't hear about -- such as the 3 billion people around the world who have less than optimal vision, but have no access to glasses. What would my life be like in that circumstance? Pretty damn miserable. My glasses are something I take totally for granted.

Thanks to Joshua Silver for thinking about them, and spending 20 years to do something about it. As the NPR story noted, he's had offers to sell the technology for exclusive commercial use, but has turned them down to fulfill his vision of sight for the world.

Note: As a commenter on NPR noted, this design doesn't deal with astigmatism.

Type High

I picked up this postcard back at the No Coast Craft-O-Rama back in December. I liked it, of course, or I wouldn't have bought it. But over the past month I've been liking it more and more, and wanted to share it.

The letterpress artist, Rebecca Ann Rakstad of Rar Rar Press, printed it in two passes. The second pass was Goudy Heavyface in red ink, but the first -- now, that's the interesting part: Rebecca turned some wood type upside down and inked the bottoms to create the squares.

Her slogan is "Type High Since 2004." If you're not into letterpress, you may not realize that's more than a description of Rebecca's state of mind. "Type high" refers to the height of the block of type, including the relief cutting of each letter. Anything you want to print, whether a letter, dingbat, piece of woodcut art or block of color has to be type high or it won't print -- or if it's taller than type high, it'll wreck the press.

So Many Books, So Few Publishers

A month or so ago, I was listening to NPR's Weekend Edition and heard a story about the demise of a book publishing house. I don't even remember which publisher it was, but I know it got me thinking about how the technology of book production is cheaper now than it's ever been, even though staying in business in the publishing industry appears to be more difficult than ever.

My sense was that there used to be a lot more publishing houses in the past, but as far as I knew, there were a lot fewer books published in those days than today -- so how did they all stay in business?

So like any good citizen of the 21st century, I looked it up in Google and found a site called Swivel.com, which has all sorts of graphs showing how many books were published in the U.S. in the last 110 years (relative to population growth and a whole bunch of other comparisons). Pretty cool.

This graph from Swivel shows the number of books published each year (in thousands). Check out the huge upswing that began in the early 1960s! Then a major dip in the early 1990s, a spike in the late 90s and a recent, fairly precipitous drop. (Perhaps that post-1990 peak is the Harry Potter phenomenon.)


An interesting take on the tribulations of book publishing can be found in a 2002 article from Salon.com.

Obama Mania -- at a Price

When it comes to both kitsch and sucker-born-every-minute examples, "commemorative" objects are a category all their own. As I began to see the Obama inauguration commemoratives being advertised, I put them in a pile. Here are a few:


Commemorative photo collage with "24kt gold-plated solid bronze medallions" from the Danbury Mint. Listed at $99 plus $9.90 shipping and handling (payable in three monthly installments).


A "Collector's Folio" from PCS Stamps & Coins, sporting an uncirculated Illinois State Quarter, a 24kt-gold, electroplated Obamamedal, a one-day-only postmark from Inauguration day, and three "mint-condition" stamps -- arranged around a "specially commissioned portrait." All this for $59 plus $4.50 shipping and handling (payable in two installments).

Commemorative plate from Telebrands. Listed as $19.99 plus $6.99 shipping and handling. (Oddly, if you send them a check, however, the cost including handling is $33.97.) This one comes with a special bonus -- a U.S. Mint commemorative President Washington coin.

I'm not critiquing buttons or t-shirts, you'll notice, and also no items that have a hint of cleverness. No, these are all straight-up kitsch -- plaques and plates, primarily.

The prices on these items are silly and outrageous, but they're clearly labeled, and so if someone pays the money, they know what they're getting.

Not so the most recent pitch I saw in today's Star Tribune from the hacks at Universal Media Syndicate and the World Reserve Monetary Exchange. Their full-page ad talks a whole lot about a "free" Obama presidential quarter, while what it is actually selling is a "solid Silver coin for forty-nine dollars" in a "handsome Presidential Display" (i.e. box). If you order that item, you get the "free" quarter with it.


Note the lack of numerals or dollar signs in that price (suddenly, $49 = forty-nine dollars), a technique they also use in their ads for the Universal Health Card. I read the coin ad thoroughly without seeing the price until I looked more carefully. (The other item shown in the ad, a set of five Obama coins, is never given a price at all.) This obfuscation of the price is a common tactic in UMS ads.

Other common UMS tactics used in the ad:

• The scare tactic of limited time ("all those who beat the 48-hour order deadline")
• Inclusion of a map dividing the country up into territories with supposed different access to the product
• Provision of a "claim code" that makes the product look more limited and special
• The use of words like "authorized," "restricted" and "exclusive."

The copy says that UMS makes no promises about the coins appreciating in value, but at the same time it recounts numerous examples of other items that have appreciated in value, implying the coins could do the same. There is absolutely no possibility these coins will have any special value -- there are too many of them. (The reason Teddy Roosevelt campaign buttons are worth $3,000 is because there are not very many of them. Remember all those Beanie Babies you see for sale for $1? The ones everyone thought would finance their retirement? Yeah. Like that.)

As anyone who has read my past posts on UMS knows, I find the company and its products revolting. Their Obama coin offer sinks to a new low. Perhaps the new Obama administration will do something to protect gullible consumers from the UMS and its products.

Let's Get to Work

I just reread Obama's inaugural address, and I like it better. I'm not saying I didn't like it the first time, but I have a tendency to not pay enough attention when I first hear something. I guess I'm a visual learner, rather than an auditory one.

The highlights for me:

• The overall message that we have to put away childish things and accept sacrifice, responsibility and common effort if we're going to have a chance of solving the problems we face. I've been waiting for years for a politician to say that and mean it.
• The statement that he will return science to its proper place in government decision making.
• "We reject the false choice between our safety and our ideals."
• The inclusion of nonbelievers in his list of belief communities. (That probably surprised me more than anything in the whole speech.)

I thought that closing with George Washington and the "winter of our hardship" was appropriate and moving. (Although I may resonate more than many people with the revolutionary army's situation, having read a fair amount about it.) I think the decision to quote Washington was meant to reinforce that Obama is in some ways moving beyond race -- since Washington, the slave-owning father of our country, is not usually a prime source of quotes for black folks.

As for Rick Warren's invocation, I thought it was perfunctory and forgettable. Joseph Lowery's benediction, on the other hand, was memorable. I especially liked his urging that we "turn to each other and not on each other." It was a fitting conclusion to the inauguration ceremony.

And now, let's get to work!

Remembering Bayard Rustin on Martin Luther King Day

As I was going home last Friday, NPR played a clip from a talk given by Martin Luther King, Jr., when he visited India in 1959 to learn first-hand about the work of Mahatma Gandhi. The recording was recently discovered as India prepares to mark the 50th anniversary of King's visit.

I didn't know that King visited India, but I had heard that another civil rights organizer, Bayard Rustin, had been there earlier, and had greatly influenced King's thinking about nonviolence. An old friend recently pointed me in the direction of a documentary about Rustin, Brother Outsider, and also an article about him.

While I have yet to see the documentary, I did appreciate the article. The writer, Chris Lombardi, said:

Rustin traveled to India, hoping to meet Mahatma Gandhi and learn about Gandhi’s principles of active nonviolent resistance: not passivity, not simple refusal to go to war, but throwing one’s body in the machinery of war and oppression. “We need in every community a group of angelic troublemakers,” he wrote upon his return. “Our power is in our ability to make things unworkable. The only weapon we have is our bodies, and we need to tuck them in places so wheels don’t turn.”

Rustin's concept of nonviolence as tucking your body into the gears of the system so that they can no longer turn is a far cry from how nonviolent resistance seems to be thought of today, for the most part. So often, it seems more of a token resistance -- sit down until you're arrested and carted away in a bus. Of course, I think the government has gotten better at eliminating opportunities for a more engaged resistance: invoking the spectre of terrorism as a reason to keep citizens from getting close to the gears.

I can't help wondering, though, what Rustin would be doing in our present circumstances?

Thank Nevaeh for Little Girls

I'm behind the times, I admit it. But I'm also behind the Times. I guess that's not much of a surprise, either.

My daughter just told me about a name that's become very popular for baby girls: Nevaeh. Aside from bring unpronounceable, unintelligible and appearing to arise from nowhere, I wouldn't have thought too hard about it until she told me its derivation: it's Heaven spelled backwards.

To which one can't help but reply, So, does that mean they'll name their sons Lleh? (Perhaps it's an old Welsh name.)

Well, the New York Times' Jennifer 8 Lee beat me to it -- she had a story on this topic back in May 2008, the headline of which was "And If It's a Boy, Will It Be Lleh?"

According to Lee, Nevaeh has become a popular name with evangelical Christian parents. Which seems very odd to me -- aren't these the same people who think that song lyrics played backwards contain satanic messages?

Bradley Scholzman, Poster Boy for Bad Government

This just in from my latest blog discovery, Syndicate & Hague.

Writer Sara recounts a series of documented quotes from Bradley J. Schlozman (former assistant attorney general, Civil Rights Division, Department of Justice under George W. Bush), who went out of his way to fire and prevent the hiring of anyone further to the left than Alberto Gonzalez. This was during the same timeframe as the U.S. Attorneys scandal.

As Sara said,"Sometimes when I read tales of the Bush Administration, I think I’m accidentally reading McSweeney’s. Then I pause and check the domain and think -- no, no, this is actually real."

To add insult to injury after all of Scholzman's overt discrimination and politicization of the DOJ, he was promoted to become the U.S. Attorney for western Missouri in 2006. But he couldn't hold onto it (knowing he wouldn't be confirmed by the Senate, which had been taken over by "pinkos" and "commies" in the 2006 election) and finally left the DOJ in late 2007. He's now in private practice in Kansas City.

What Will You Miss About Newspapers?

Writer/big idea guy Seth Godin posted a piece to his blog on January 14 with the title When Newspapers Are Gone, What Will You Miss?

Godin said he wouldn't miss much:

The reality is that [investigation and analysis are] relatively cheap (compared to everything else the newspaper had to do in order to bring it to us.) Newspapers took two cents of journalism and wrapped in ninety-eight cents of overhead and distraction.

Cory Doctorow picked it up on BoingBoing, asking readers what they would miss about newspapers, and I spent Friday evening (before and after Battlestar Galactica) reading the comment thread.

At least 30 percent of the commenters provided some version of "I'll miss the newsprint, since it's so useful as a bird cage liner / gift wrap / paper maché / window cleaner" etcetera. Many said they wouldn't miss newspapers at all. But there were a number of insightful comments as well, showing the quality of the BoingBoing comment threads once again (in contrast to the majority of comments on newspaper sites, for example).

Here's what I'll miss, some of which echoes comments from BoingBoing:

• editors -- in an age when there is more and more to know and less to time to know it, I sure value the possibility of having a trusted editor work for me at 50 cents a day
  
• beat reporters -- who else is going to sit through government meetings to find out what's happening 2 hours and 37 minutes into it? Is that something the average blogger has time for? I remember when Craig Cox was covering the Minneapolis City Council meetings for his Minneapolis Observer site, a practice he maintained for about a year or so. It was great. But sometimes you have to get a job.
  
• serendipity -- as with that other great lost resource, the card catalog, having paper in front of you that carries bits of information you're not looking for is key to keeping an open mind and learning things you weren't expecting
  
• investigative reporters and their budgets -- this is perhaps the most obvious one, and while it's easy to say that newspapers haven't been doing investigative reporting for the past five or ten years, that's really not true.
  
• the fact that we all know how it works... We know that there are reporters and editors creating a paper, and if we have news we know who to call. Without newspapers, who would you call to make sure everyone knows about something outrageous that happens? I just saw a perfect example in today's Pioneer Press: a woman got a ticket for parking in front of her asthmatic kid's school while making a five-minute drop-off (during a snow emergency on one of our -15 degree days). The ticketers, who worked for a private company hired by the city, laughed at her. Obviously, somebody called the paper and there it is two days later; the ticketers have been fired, and the city and company have apologized. Without a newspaper, where would someone with a story like that turn? There are local news sites, of course, but there's no "big stick" like a daily newspaper that's read by most of the adults in a community.
  

Enough from me. Here's a sampling of my favorite comments from the BoingBoing thread; the ones I wish I'd written. (All reproduced exactly as written, without editing or correction. It is a comment thread, after all!)

Hephaistos, comment #23:

It's a lot more serious than that. Even if the 2% number is accurate, you're blithely ignoring the whole idea of local news. Every singly city, town and burg in the country has news that is important to the residents of that location -- local papers cover that. Sure, the quality varies wildly, but they are there, writing about their town or region so the residents know what's up. It's a vast army of paid reporters gathering and circulation information. It's easy to find out what Obama did today, but what happened two miles away? Who's going to go to every city council meeting in every town in America, and stay to the end? TV won't do it, radio won't do it, and neither will the citizen journalist.

Newspapers create paid reporting jobs in every community in America -- how many local news websites are there that have writers who are paid living wages to write about news in their community? I'd venture close to zero. We're looking at the collapse of news itself, and may be coming up on an age of even greater isolation and ignorance about our local communities -- the Wal-Mart-ization of news. Will something spring up to take its place? Maybe, I hope so, but it's certainly not clear what.

#48 posted by wordtipping

I will miss the layout. A great effort was made to makes papers read-able, so that your eyes moved easily across the pages. The same is true of magazines. The web has failed to recapture this feeling. The web is just as informative but much less sophisticated. Reading the news on a website feels like reading a stack of paper with too bright clip art everywhere.

#49 posted by my_belly

The serendipity. I read plenty of news online, but I know the way I read nytimes.com is very different from the way I sit down in front of the paper version when I get home. With the physical paper I'll go through each page and read the at least the lead of every article. I don't browse like that online; if a headline doesn't grab me, my mouse is on to the next link.

Commenter #67 is journalist Joshua Ellis, who posted his own essay in response to Godin on his blog, ZenArchery. A couple of excerpts:

I think the key here is in the last paragraph of Godin’s post. The statement that “the reality is that this sort of journalism is relatively cheap (compared to everything else the newspaper had to do in order to bring it to us.)” is simply untrue. Having a staff of journalists costs the same as having any other kind of staff: salaries, real estate, equipment, insurance, utilities, the whole nine yards....

Godin also says “The magic of the web, the reason you should care about this even if you don’t care about the news, is that when the marginal cost of something is free and when the time to deliver it is zero, the economics become magical.”

But it’s not free. I can’t understand why people don’t see this. Writing an article about corruption in local or national politics is not free. It takes time and money to make it happen — more time and money than this blog post took, or Godin’s post took, enough time and money that most people can’t afford to do it simply for whuffie or blogerati status. Delivering it may be free and instantaneous, but that doesn’t mean making it is free and instantaneous.

#74 posted by Anonymous

News gathering, investigation and reporting will have to become a donation funded enterprise ala PBS and NPR. There is no other way to break the ownership of advertisers over the important work of telling the truth.

Instead of mourning the dead tree editions (I will too, honestly), and even more bizarrely, mourning the corrupt money-hungry system that spoils modern news, how about we get busy setting up non-profit news sources that pay their reporters and editors good salaries to tell the truth, with no threats of advertisers pulling the plug on uncomfortable revelations.

#77 posted by Anonymous

One good thing about newspaper: You don't have to hear the "correct" opinions of the countless idiots who use "teh internets". When someone has a paper, they can yell and scream and whine all they want at the pages, but I don't have to hear they're BS.

#81 posted by Anonymous

I know this sounds funny, but I miss the ads. Specifically, in NYC, the theater ads. I was in a doctor's office recently where there was a copy of the Sunday Times Arts & Leisure, and saw ads announcing a whole mess of shows I didn't even know there were plans for. Sure, I could find out about them if I explicitly subscribed to playbill.com or something like that, but sometimes you really do want things pushed to you.

For some reason, the web equivalent of a full-page ad in the times is obtrusive rather than a bold statement, which is in some ways a shame.

#86 posted by FonHom

I will miss reading the news that I wouldn't have chosen to read...the articles that wouldn't appear in my custom feed.

Who doesn't want to learn things outside of what they already care about?

A lot of people, that's who. I for one wouldn't have read 90% of my schoolwork if I weren't forced to, but 90% of that 90% was very helpful.

The A section of the average US newspaper serves as a current events baseline, for better or worse. Without it, we'll breed a generation of news deniers - "If I don't choose to read it it doesn't exist." They'll get along fine with the net-naive who say that if they saw "proof" of something online it must be true. And the rest of us can - I dunno - start copying the news by hand and post it in a public place? That's an idea!

#87 posted by TharkLord

Content=Editor+Journalist

Amen to that, TharkLord.

Big Boxes Made of Ticky Tacky

On the day the Star Tribune's bankruptcy filing was announced, the paper's op-ed page was graced with a thoughtful piece by Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. Titled Big, Empty Boxes, the article reminds us of the increasing number of derelict big-box retail buildings.

Mitchell writes, "Within a few months, more than one-eighth of the country's retail space will be sitting vacant, according to some estimates." This vacancy rate is not only a result of the recent economic downturn, however, so no one should act surprised:

Since the early 1990s, the pace of retail development has far outstripped growth in spending. Between 1990 and 2005, the amount of store space in the United States doubled, ballooning from 19 to 38 square feet per person. Meanwhile, real consumer spending rose just 14 percent.

By now, everyone is probably familiar with towns where one big box has closed only to have another from the same chain open on the other side of town or in a nearby burg. I've seen one Barnes & Noble give way to another less than a mile away (the old one is still empty); more than one Walmart replaced by a Walmart Super Center; and a list of Targets replaced first by Target Greatland and now by Super Target.

Despite the apparent shock expressed by business and the media, Mitchell points out that they knew it was coming, because a big-name consulting company identified this bubble years before the recent economic slide began:

PricewaterhouseCoopers...deemed the United States vastly "overstored." In a 2003 report, the investment research firm declared that the "most overretailed country in the world hardly needs more shopping outlets of any kind."

Mitchell ends her article with a call for municipalities to remember all these empty big boxes and aging strip malls when the economy starts to pick up. Rather than allowing developers to pave even more undeveloped land -- and erect their trash buildings whose useful life is measured in years, not even decades -- they should insist on redeveloping the derelicts, and work for greater density while they're at it.

See the website Big Box Reuse for some ways that empty stores are being reused around the country. Artist Julie Christensen has been documenting successful examples, and recently published a book by the same name. Sounds like it's worth picking up.

Eleven Foods

A timely reminder from elenabella, one of my favorite bloggers, about 11 readily available foods that we should all be eating, but for the most part are not.

I eat most of these occasionally. None are staples in my house, although I've recently discovered how tasty pepitas are (toasted pumpkin seeds). The article also recommends frozen blueberries, but I've been lucky enough lately to try some dried blueberries, and they were really good, too. I assume they're also good for you.

Two things on the list I've never really tried: pomegranate juice and sardines. We'll see about that.

The World According to Televison News

Check out this short talk about how geographically unbalanced U.S. television news coverage is.

It was given by Alisa Miller of Public Radio International at the TED Conference, based on an analysis of the news in February 2007.

It Keeps the Mud Off

I saw this bike on Election Day, parked near my polling place. While the signs were the first thing to catch my attention, the thing I realy like about it is the use of half a yogurt container as a mudguard, attached with duct tape. That's the way to use what you've got!

(By the way, remember how warm it was on Election Day? It's nice to think of on a day like today when it was -18F this morning.)

The Sculptures of Tom Every

It's a snowy day in Minnesota, so I thought I'd put up a few pictures taken a few summers ago.

If you're ever near Baraboo, Wisconsin, take a side trip to see the amazing sculptures of Tom Every, better known as Dr. Evermor -- the greatest living environment builder (at least in Wisconsin, which is known for its environment builders).


Dr. Evermor is best known for this massive sculpture, The Forevertron. Built from found and salvaged parts as disparate as scrap metal and parts of Apollo 11, the Forevertron was steam punk before that had even entered anyone's vocabulary.

The book Sublime Spaces & Visionary Worlds (published by the John Michael Kohler Arts Center) said of it, "the Forevertron looks like a merry-go-round gone mad: a science fiction fantasy seemingly come to life from the pages of Jules Verne or H.G. Wells; a gigantic octopussian object that the artist describes as a 'soul-transformative device' " (page 345).


The Forevertron includes this tower Tea House, where royalty would sit to watch as Dr. Evermor perpetuated himself through the heavens.


Surrounding the Forevertron are dozens or even hundreds of bird sculptures, making up a single work that Every calls the Bird Band.


The Cello Birds are one part of the Bird Band.


The sculptor in repose on the day of our visit. Every was recovering from a stroke at the time of our visit, and I'm not sure how he's been doing more recently. I hope he's well.

_______________

A book called A Mythic Obsession: The World of Dr. Evermor came out last spring, collecting conversations between Every and the book's author, Tom Kupsch, and including quite a number of photos. A significant portion of it is viewable on Google Books.

Suck It in -- Who Ever Heard of a Probiotic Straw?

I was flipping through the Sunday coupons recently when I saw this ad for a new Nestle product called Boost Kid Essentials. Immunity & More in Every Sip! the headline cries out.

I glanced at the list of bullet points and saw that, in addition to vitamins, minerals, protein and kid-approved taste, the new product includes probiotics.

Now, being the co-op shopper that I am, I know that probiotics are "friendly" bacteria found in yogurt and kefir, among other products. So I thought, I wonder how sour this "kid-approved taste" is?

That's when my eye fell on the illustration and lettering in the bottom left corner of the ad (shown enlarged here): "Immunity support from probiotic straw!"

What?!?

Basically, a Swedish company called BioGaia has created a straw that contains a drop of Lactobacillus reuteri, which is activated by contact with liquid, and then gets sucked in with each sip of the Nestle drink.

This is big news in the world of nutraceuticals. L. reuteri is a naturally occurring bacteria found in the guts of birds and mammals, which -- get this -- has been trademarked by BioGaia.

Reading the Wikipedia entry on L. reuteri is quite an experience. It may prevent childhood diarrhea caused by the rotavirus as well as Salmonella, H. pylori (the cause of ulcers), E. coli, Cryptosporidium, and infant colic. It may cure or prevent tooth decay and gingivitis. Infants in child care who had L. reuteri in their food were sick half as often as those who didn't have it in their diet. And it might be a good replacement for the antibiotics that are routinely fed to livestock animals to increase their growth rates.

It doesn't sound as though L. reuteri occurs naturally in any food products: it's just something that should be present in out intestines, but may not always be there at sufficiently high levels or may have been killed by antibiotics. The commercial supplies of it have been propagated in labs, starting from source bacteria taken from humans.

I've classified this entry as good technology, but I feel a bit ambivalent about it. Obviously, with all the health benefits uncovered so far, it's probably a good technology. But I can't help wondering if there's not some other way to foster this bacteria that occurs naturally in humans without the use of a straw.

Universal Media Syndicate -- Half-Truths, Puffery and Outright Lies

If it seems like you're seeing more and more newspaper ads that pretend to be news stories, you're not imagining things.

The ads are created by a business called Universal Media Syndicate, which specializes in buying up "remnant advertising" space from newspapers. Basically, they sign a contract with the papers saying they'll buy any quarter-, half- or full-page ad spaces at rock-bottom prices. They're the advertiser of last resort.

How does it work?

The papers' ad departments have UMS's insertion orders on hand along with advertising art for a range of questionable products, from expensive space heaters to the Universal Health Card to the product I saw in yesterday's Pioneer Press, an over-the-counter joint medication called Trigosamine.

All the ads look like newspaper articles, but beyond that, there are commonalities in the design approach and details among them. For instance, the Universal Health Card, Amish Heater and Trigosamine ads all set their photo cutlines in a not-too-common sans serif face, with a gray square bullet at the beginning of the line, followed by bold capital letters as a lead-in to the caption. (In fact, the bottom of the Amish heater ad and the Universal Health Card ad is identical except the specific photos used and the wording of the cutlines. Click on the image for an enlarged version.)


All use Helvetica Condensed Bold or Extrabold for the headline. All have hairline rules around the photos and light gray sidebar boxes.

The Triogsamine and Amish heater ads purposely reinforce their similarity to news design by including an actual byline: "BY G.W. NAPIER, Universal Media Syndicate" for Trigosamine and "BY MARK WOODS, Universal Media Syndicate" for the Amish heaters. In a context where readers may be familiar with Universal Press Syndicate (distributor of comic strips like For Better or For Worse and Garfield and numerous feature columns like Dear Abby) and United Press International (long-time competitor with the Associated Press), the use of a name like Universal Media Syndicate is clearly intended to borrow credibility the ads don't deserve.

The ads share a common set-up:

1. There's a product with a startling claim (access to health care, joint pain relief, cheap winter heat).
2. It's only available for a limited time, sometimes in limited quantity.
3. A long passage of text is included, written in a pseudo-journalistic style, with quotes attributed to people with authoritative-sounding titles.
4. There are sidebar boxes with diagrams and details that bolster credibility.
5. Multiple photos are used with cutlines that repeat key points from the body copy, since many readers won't read all that type.
6. The reader is called to action by use of an 800 number, and the ad is assigned a "claim code" that the caller is supposed to use. This reinforces the implied limited availability of the product.

Who are these UMS people?

Universal Media Syndicate is located in Canton, Ohio, near the Akron-Canton Airport. And it's not just the creator of these ads, it's actually part of a larger company that is the distributor of the products as well: Arthur Middleton Capital Holdings, which is owned by a guy named Rodney Napier.

On its website, Arthur Middleton says that its mission is "to have pride, purpose, profit & growth because we will exceed our customer's expectations." It's named for one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, who probably wishes he could sue for defamation of character.

In addition to Universal Media Syndicate, the Arthur Middleton site lists several other companies as subsidiaries: HeatSurge (makers of the Amish heaters), PatentHealth (creator of Trigosamine), World Reserve Monetary Exchange, Republic Telcom Worldwide, and Midwest Model Management.

World Reserve Monetary Exchange -- with its pseudo-governmental name -- markets "collectible" coins and uncut sheets of U.S. currency at higher than market rates. According to coincollector.org, WRME consistently sells currency products that are available at half the cost. (As an incentive in one ad, they offered to include "a cross made with grains of sacred sand from Christ's tomb." !)

Republic Telcom employs several hundred people in call centers to support all of the Arthur Middleton products. Midwest Model Management appears to be what its name implies, but I'll bet part of their work is to provide models for all those photos in the UMS ads. (These guys are all about vertical integration; why pay somebody else when you can do it yourself?)

How does the Universal Health Card fit into this picture? According to the Independent newspaper (Massillon, Ohio) in a story back in September 2008, Universal Health Card was opening a call center in a former Republic Steel building, taking advantage of a $2.1 million Job Tax Credit from the state. The tax credit had originally been arranged for Arthur Middleton's PatentHealth subsidiary, but was to be used by UHC, "a company associated with [PatentHealth's] parent-owner, Rodney Napier." According to the Independent, Napier helped a local auto dealer, Doug Waikem, start UHC, and "although not listed on [Arthur Middleton's] web site, Waikem's Universal Health Card LLC is part of Arthur Middleton."

The $2.1 million tax credit from the state was given to create 500 jobs in the economically distressed area, south of Cleveland. In July 2008, the Independent also reported on a different expansion of Arthur Middleton's business interests in Jackson Township near Akron, this time netting a 45 percent tax credit.

It's pathetic that the mayor of Canton and the lieutenant governor of Ohio have fallen all over themselves to praise Napier's companies as they expand into new locations. Do they have any idea what kinds of jobs Napier is creating, what types of products they're helping to unleash on an unsuspecting public?

In addition to his for-profit businesses, Napier is behind a nonprofit called the Granted Wish Foundation, located in the same building as Arthur Middleton, which lists all the Arthur Middleton companies as corporate sponsors. If I were the Ohio attorney general or even the IRS, I'd be interested in looking into just how nonprofit that foundation is.



Walking the line between puffery and outright lies

When does puffery turn into lies?

As I said in my first post on the Universal Health Card, the list of providers who accept the card is at a minimum hard to verify and most likely highly exaggerated or even partially fabricated (based on news and Better Business Bureau stories from around the country, compiled in my second post).

The Amish heaters perform as promised (they make heat), but are priced higher than comparable heaters that are widely available, and won't save you money on your overall heating bill as promised -- just on your gas bill, since you'll be paying for electricity instead of gas. (See Karen Youso's column from the Star Tribune analyzing both the cost of running the Amish heater and the cost of purchasing one vs. other options.)

The Trigosamine ad claims that there is a double-blind, placebo-controlled study that found "significant" positive benefit from its mixture of three drugs (the familiar glucosamine sulfate and two others). (As has been recently reported, the effectiveness of glucosamine is being questioned.) Of course, the ad doesn't give an actual citation to the research. Looking on the Trigosamine website, I found the title of the research, and then via Google found a specific reference to it at www.scribd.com (page 119 of the lengthy document, which is not actually a medical source, but rather an analysis of key trends in "nutraceutical" food and drinks). It reports that the study included just 20 patients, and that there was a statistically significant improvement in pain measurement when they were given one of the three ingredients listed as part of Trigosamine. However, if half the group of 20 was assigned to placebo and half the drug, that means only 10 people are in each experimental group... can you even compute statistical significance from a group that size?

But even if it does have statistically significant effects, the fact remains that Trigosamine is not the only product that includes this ingredient. It is readily available and not subject to limited quantities or timeframes, and can probably be had for a better price (or at least one that doesn't include shipping and handling) at your local drugstore.

In general, all the UMS ads belong to the Chicken Little school of advertising, warning you that there's only a short time to get the product or service. This is patently untrue, since Napier's hundreds of call center employees are eagerly waiting to talk to anyone who calls, any time. The Trigosamine ad, for instance, said "we can only allow the phone lines to be open for 72 hours because we have to be able to get it to people in other parts of the country." This is known as the "scarcity effect" and while it's one of the oldest tricks in the book, the UMS ads come up with a new twist based on time, rather than quantity.

Aside from being untrue, it's also just plain silly, given that these ads are waiting to run whenever the newspapers have trouble filling space -- so UMS has no idea until the last minute that an ad will run in any given market.

As the newspapers get more desperate for ad revenue, we'll see more and more of these ads, I'm afraid. I'd like to think that most people are too smart to fall for these appeals, but the growth of Rodney Napier's companies over the past few years makes it clear that quite a number are willing to fork over their cash, based on the ads' promises.

Ironically, Napier is looking to hire an attorney as Senior Corporate Counsel for Arthur Middleton Capital Holding. The notice on the website says the job requires "5+ years experience working for a State or Federal government agency in the area of consumer protection" (emphasis added).

From what I can tell, Rodney Napier never met a consumer protection law he couldn't skirt.

______________

NPR recently ran a story on the increased number of infomercials during prime television hours, and it's happening for the same reason -- with the economic downturn and auto industry troubles, particularly, remnant advertising agencies are buying up TV time at low prices so they can sell products no one really needs (PedEgg, Snuggies and ShamWow) or that don't work at all (HeadOn).

Roland Burris Mausoleum Addendum

I wonder how Roland Burris, Illinois's newest senator, plans to update his pre-carved mausoleum?

He was pretty clever: leaving just enough space to allow an additional line or two, while still preserving a decent overall appearance in case he didn't have anything else to add before he died. I admire that kind of forethought.

But Burris carved himself into a corner when he set up his bullet list with the label "First African-American in Illinois to become"...

Because now he's a U.S. senator -- which is a pretty big deal and definitely would make the list of things to put on your mausoleum -- but he's not the first African-American senator from Illinois by a long shot.

What to do, what to do?

I know!



(By the way, whoever heard of using bullets on a grave marker? Has PowerPoint's influence reached its ultimate level?)

Welcome, Seward Co-op!

Today was a big day in the neighborhood where I work -- the new Seward Co-op opened its doors. For those of you not from the Twin Cities, you might be interested to know that Minnesota has more food co-ops than any other state; Minneapolis alone has four, St. Paul two (one of which has two locations). The new Seward store is now the largest food co-op in the Twin Cities, surpassing the Wedge and Lakewinds' Chanhassen location.

Unfortunately, I forgot to bring along a decent camera and so was stuck taking photos with my phone. My apologies. (The photo above is by Peter Fleck, from his Flickr stream of images of the store's preview, back in December.)


Several hundred people (maybe as many as 500 -- it sure seemed like a lot) waited fairly patiently in the cold for about 20 minutes, listening to speeches.

It really is a lot of work to raise the money, design a store, get all the permits, and then build it! So the many people who've been working on the new store for years were recognized. ($1.5 million was raised in loans from members of the total $10.5 million project cost. That doesn't happen when Whole Foods builds a store.)

The new space is twice as big as the old one, with 13,000 retail square feet. It's the first LEED gold-certified food co-op in the country, meaning it was built with very high standards for energy use, using recycled materials, and capturing stormwater.


One major change is the addition of a full-service meat counter. All of the meat (except some of the fish) is local, and the co-op is making its own sausages, too. It was an impressive-looking meat display, but there were too many people in front of it to get a picture!


The deli is about four times as big as the old one, with double-sided salad and hot-food bars (hallelujah!), and a real bakery counter. You can load your hot food or salad into a reusable dish (complete with metal flatware) and then eat it in the sunny dining area in the front of the store. No more takeout containers! And I hear there's supposed to be free WiFi, too.

For better photos than mine, especially of the ribbon cutting, check out the pfhyper blog and his Flickr page.

Growing Power -- An Inspiration

I've written before about Milwaukee's Growing Power organization, and I just read a new article in a magazine called Biocycle that explains a lot of what they're doing. GP's founder, Will Allen, was recently awarded a MacArthur genius grant, and it's not hard to see why.

Basically, Growing Power does intensive all-year farming in cold climates, using greenhouses, and shares the techniques it develops with anyone who's interested in learning. They compost 80,000 pounds of food waste a week, create quality soil by both regular and worm composting, grow fish and plants together in an integrated aquaponics system, and grow vegetables that are sold in the area.

In fact, I'm almost overwhelmed with everything they do -- I'm very inspired, but I don't know where to start! Here are some of the facts I picked up from the article and watching the videos:

• GP produces $5 worth of food per square foot; that equals $200,000 per acre.
• They grow greens all winter, some of them in greenhouses that are not conventionally heated (the heat is a byproduct of composting materials in the greenhouse).
• They're working on anaerobic digestion, which takes five tons of food waste a day and turns it into energy to heat the greenhouses.
• They're constantly looking for new ways to become more self-sustaining. One current example: Although they give conventional fish food to the fish they grow with aquaponics, GP is figuring out how to breed Black Soldier Fly larvae to use as feed instead. The larvae are naturally attracted to some of the material GP is already composting.
• GP makes its own potting mix by using half worm compost and half coir (instead of peat moss). Coir is the nonfood part of the coconut. As GP's co-director says, peat moss is a nonrenewable resource, whereas coir is. There are three coconut trees for every person on our planet, and using coir makes the entire coconut usable.

Outpost Natural Food Co-op in Milwaukee has made three short tour videos about GP. You can check them out on YouTube.

This sure gets my plant/gardening brain working in combination with my organizational brain... why isn't someone modeling GP's whole enterprise in the Twin Cities?

Jumping into the Deep End

By the time I was a senior in high school I had already earned all the needed credits except English (and gym, which in those days was required for four years, not the single semester my daughter will have to endure). Freed of most obligations, I decided to take two classes at a nearby public university.

Since I was a self-described writer, one of the classes I chose was Introduction to Creative Writing. I was prolific, with two novels written in longhand, and had earned raves from my high school English teacher in her creative writing class. Why not?

But -- as my profile says -- I grew up in a rural area outside a small town. My writing was all about things I hadn't learned from experience, like cities, crime, and gangs. I was fascinated by a world I had only read about, not believing the things I actually knew could be potential story material. You won't be surprised to hear that my work was all badly written drivel (which is obvious to any adult who looks at it).

In hindsight, I wasn't much of a candidate for my new class and its teacher, Richard Price. I had never heard of Price, who was about 28 at the time and had already published two novels (The Wanderers and Blood Brothers). This is a guy whose work is known for its gritty urban realism and naturalistic dialog. Who went on to be nominated for Oscars (The Color of Money) and Emmys (The Wire), and to have his books acclaimed in the New York Times Book Review.

It's funny to think what Price's attitude might have been about this class. I imagine that in a lot of ways, it was mostly a job he had to do to support his real work -- which was taking off, but may not have been supporting him yet. He was finishing his third book, Ladies' Man (it came out the next year). And the movie version of The Wanderers was probably well into development at the time. During the class, I imagined he loved the other students, who were all writing about life in New York City, but it's possible he thought their work was just as boring and bad as mine. Who knows.

I read his two novels and was staggered by what they implied about the level of his expectations: Not only are they urban and compellingly written, they're also extremely male. My stories, based on knowledge drawn from what I'd read rather than what I knew, often focused on male protagonists and centered on masculine themes as well -- but I could see the hollowness at the heart of my characters.

I dropped the course after a month or so, overwhelmed by my inadequacy and lack of knowledge of the world. It put a damper on my college aspirations as well: At the beginning of my senior year, given my test scores and grades, I had been thinking of applying to Bryn Mawr or Wellesley, but I retreated from that and went with safer schools, close to home.

In fairness to my 17-year-old self, I would say that the course wasn't really structured like an introductory class. It actually wasn't structured much at all -- we were just supposed to write some pages and turn them in, sometimes reading aloud to the rest of the class. This was a great opportunity for people who were already "real" writers to shine, but not so good for those who needed to be nurtured. My later experience with another teacher in the same course was entirely different, and much more successful. Price's class was more similar to the intermediate or even the advanced class that I took later as I completed the creative writing major.

I don't have an ending for this recollection, except to say that, since then, I've never been a big fan of the sink-or-swim approach to education. I think it's important for young people to meet a challenge when they're developmentally ready for it and have half a chance to succeed, because it can be damaging to be totally blown out of the water. How that meshes with the idea that there should be consequences for decisions we make as young people -- the so-called right to fail -- I don't know.

But I still enjoy Richard Price's books and screenplays. As Walter Kirn said in his review of Price's latest book, Lush Life, Price is "a consummate stalker-realist," part Raymond Chandler, part Saul Bellow.

Who wouldn't want to read that?

For the Birds

Wow, I think it would be a lot of fun to have a political discussion with the owners of this vehicle, don't you?


Just how many eagle-flag combos can you get on one SUV, anyway?


This one has four, counting the license plate (heck, there may have been more on the front end -- I forgot to check).

I especially liked this one (featured on both the left and right side rear window), where the flag appears to have been tattooed onto the side of the eagle's head.

All I can say is, at least the driver can see through it; note the texture of small holes that make it more-or-less transparent from the inside.

(For a design critique of the "stripes and eagle" Minnesota license plate seen here, visit marksimonson.com.)