Auto-Tuning Run Amok

I first heard about auto-tuning of music from Daughter Number Three-Point-One. She was talking about it with her father and I had no idea what it was. This was a number of years ago, and, naively, I still can't believe it has become so common.

I don't mind when it's done as an effect to create an electronic sound, but it's usually just a default, not intended to be noticed. You don't need to be able to sing anymore to have a career as a singer.

My favorite singers all sing off key at least occasionally. It's a badge of honor.

Which brings me to this recent graphic by Michael Leddy at Orange Crate Art. It's brilliant, I say, smiling squarely.

Moon Over Manifest

The Newbery-winning novel Moon Over Manifest made me cry, but anyone who knows me realizes I'm a sucker for plucky young heroines in hard times. Even if I hate the word plucky.

I liked the main character, the town of Manifest, and the mystery. Though I had a hard time shaking the impression that the book could have been called Out of the Holes Because of Winn Dixie. (Without the dog.)

The thing that shocked me about the book, though, was two very obvious editing errors. These weren't run-of-the-mill typos, either.

The first is on page 126, when Jinx tells the story of what happened in his past when Junior confronted Finn:

In one move, Finn wrenched the knife from Junior's hand and twisted his arm behind his back.

Finn winced in pain. "I was just funning with you, Finn. I wouldn't have turned you in."

Leaving aside the wonky antecedents in the first paragraph, the second paragraph has Finn wincing in pain because he is twisting Junior's arm behind his (Junior's, I assume) back.

Did anyone proofread this part? It made the section hard to understand and completely disrupted the narrative.

The second is clearly an editing error. On pages 139 through 144, our heroine Abilene tells about sharing ginger snaps with her friends Lettie and Ruthanne. Lettie's mother had made the treats for a family birthday, after everyone gave up eggs for a week so they could trade for sugar to make a dozen cookies.

Lettie brings two cookies for Ruthanne and Abilene. The book clearly says that Ruthanne ate all of the cookie she's given, while Abilene shares half of hers with Lettie, despite her claim that she "already had my fill."

Yet a few pages later, Abilene narrates:

I admired how Ruthanne knew what I did not. That Lettie hadn't had her fill of gingersnaps. With six kids in her family, she had more than likely given up her own cookie and traded something for an extra one to share with us.

I don't know when Ruthanne revealed this perceptiveness to Abilene, but it's not in the pages of the book. I reread the section three times looking for something I had missed, but it wasn't there. Again, a major disruption of the narrative.

On the positive side, it's a book that young readers will like, and it sheds light on some important parts of American history, such as Prohibition, exploitative company towns, the Klan, and anti-immigrant sentiments. And it includes this great bit of family advice:

Lettie and Ruthanne were away for a couple of days at their great-aunt Bert's second funeral. Her first, they said, had been on Aunt Bert's seventy-fourth birthday. She'd wanted to hear all the nice things folks would say about her, so they went ahead and held the services early.

But this time was for real and Lettie said everyone was trying to come up with new nice things to say. Unfortunately, as Great Aunt Bert could be a bit cantankerous, they were having to be creative. According to Lettie, most of the family agreed that in the future, family members would be allowed only one funeral and they'd have to pick if it would be when they were dead or alive (pages 169-170).

That passage alone made it worth reading, if not worthy of the Newbery Medal.

Citizens, Not Customers

Clifford Robinson of Brooklyn Park had a letter worth reading in today's Star Tribune:

House Speaker Kurt Zellers described state government as a "company" and the state's citizens as "customers" ("GOP rushes to craft budget," March 28). That false comparison lies at the heart of the Republican dilemma.

State government is a political organ created by the people through the Constitution to do the will of the people.

If Zellers and his comrades would take off their ideological blinders, they would see that it is not the will of the people that thousands of their fellow citizens be denied basic health and welfare needs, that funds to the state's colleges and university be slashed, that public safety be compromised, and that the livability of our central cities be sacrificed for partisan reasons.

Thanks, Clifford, for fighting the good fight in the editorial pages.

What's the Plan? I'm Afraid to Find Out

I'm too angry to write about our legislature's efforts to double Metro Transit bus fares, the destruction of schools by standardized testing, or the 37 percent unemployment rate among 18- to 29-year-olds. Let alone the Star Tribune story about the food banks and the food shelves fighting over the scraps left by the well-off.

But here are a couple of links to things from today:

Discussion on overhauling No Child Left Behind on Midmorning. I knew it would be worth it when the first guest, Monty Neil from FairTest. answered Kerri Miller's first question this way:

Kerri Miller: No Child Left Behind -- scrap it or reform it? What do you think?

Monty Neil: Most of the additions made to the federal law under the name of No Child Left Behind and signed nearly 10 years ago should be scrapped.

Kerri Miller: Why?

Monty Neil: What NCLB did was double and triple the amount of testing done in states across the country. All the excessive testing attached to a stringent, irriational, and ultimately counterproductive accountability system has enormously turned schools into test prep programs in the tested subjects of reading and math.

They have narrowed the curriculum with less time spent on other subjects, everything from science and history to the arts and languages, even cutting recess and phys ed often. The outcome has been disgruntled teachers, turned-off students, and the rate of improvement on the one independently national test we have, the NAEP, has markedly declined in the period that NCLB has been signed.

The State of Working America calculator from the Economic Policy Institute. You can slide the years back and forth to see how much income growth went to the bottom 90 percent of earners vs. the top 5 to 10, 1 to 5 and 1 percent. Between 1946 and 2000, the bottom 90 percent got a little under half of the income growth. Between 2000 and 2007, however, all of the growth went to the top 10 percent, and three-quarters of that went to the top 1 percent.


An editorial from the Austin Daily Herald, reprinted in the Strib, pointing out the stupidity of cutting rail development now:

Equally built-up urban areas elsewhere in the country move masses of people every day on trains and express buses.

Other than a lack of foresight, there is no reason Minnesota is not doing the same. But it's not too late. Instead of building new freeway lanes, Minnesota should be building more commuter rail transportation.

This would have the dual effect of making automobile commuting less desirable, and rail transportation more pleasant -- perhaps without spending any additional dollars.

Would that be popular? No. Would it be wise? Yes. Unfortunately, this year's Legislature, like its predecessors, seems to be putting popularity ahead of wisdom.

People in Austin, Minnesota, are advocating transit funding in the Twin Cities, for cripe's sake, but our legislature is busy cutting funding to transit so the bus system will either have to cut half the routes or double the fares.

Meanwhile, wealthy dog owners in the Twin Cities have new options for their pups while they're at work:


A former Carlson hotel executive has decided to use his skills with a twist. According to the caption, "Golden retriever Riley settled into one of the suites at the Adogo Pet Hotel. The Minnetonka faclity offers upscale suits or private rooms for dogs, mimicking the human htel experience. And yes, there's room service -- prepared to the owner's instructions."

So the dogs of the rich are treated better than many human beings.

What does the Right plan to do with this country once they've gotten their way? What is their ideal society? Do they want to live in walled enclaves with armed guards (and golden retrievers) to protect them from the people they've left outside?

I really can't bear to reread The Parable of the Sower right now.

An Alternate Universe with Less Extreme Income Inequality

Today's Pioneer Press included a story on income inequality, accompanied by the graph shown at left, below. (Click it to see it larger.)


I thought it would be interesting to plot out the lines pretending we live in an alternate universe where the divergent income line that started back in the Reagan era didn't happen.

The center graph shows what it would look like if the incomes of the top 1 percent grew at just the rate of the bottom 90 percent. Gee, they still look like they'd be pretty well off.

The graph at right flips that concept around, asking, What if the incomes of the bottom 90 percent had grown at the rate of the top 1 percent?

The fact that the black line in this graph, representing the bottom 90 percent, hardly seems to have moved at all is a telling artifact that shows just how far apart the two trend lines are. Increasing income from $17K to $61K is barely visible when placed on the same scale with an increase of $252K to $906K.

All of which reminds me of a flier I saw posted on a bulletin board yesterday in Chicago:

How the Government Got in Your Backyard

I should have adored Jeff Gillman and Eric Heberlig's How the Government Got in Your Backyard. Food, plants and public policy -- what's not for me to like? But I found it a bit dry, and not as compelling as I thought it would be.

It definitely had its moments, though. Here are a few highlights and facts I didn't know.

Toxicity is not as simple as I thought: The toxicity of substances, such as pesticides, is expressed in milligrams of the poison need per kilogram of an animal's weight to have a 50 percent chance of killing it, abbreviated LD50. The lower the number, the more toxic the chemical. Gillman and Heberlig write: "Most of the pesticides you are likely to encounter on garden center shelves will have LD50s that are quite high. In fact, the caffeine in your morning coffee probably has a lower LD50 than any chemical that you or your fastidious neighbors have ever sprayed on a lawn... one of the most toxic pesticides ever known, the now-banned Black Leaf 40...was based on the insecticide nicotine...which is still legal for you to inhale or put between your cheek and gum" (page 61).

Food crops make for worse biofuel results than I thought: Not only is corn ethanol a bad way to make fuel because it's inefficient (using almost as much or more energy to create than it produces), it costs more too: "researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have calculated that, in 2007, if we were not using ethanol in our gasoline, gas prices would have been 1.4 to 2.4 percent higher. The use of crops for biofuels, however, resulted in the price of soy increasing somewhere between 10 and 20 percent, and the price of corn increasing between 15 and 28 percent" (page 102).

Ethanol corrodes pipelines: The reason ethanol-gasoline mixes are only available near the corn belt states is that ethanol can't flow through normal pipelines. It has to be shipped in relatively small quantities by train, truck or barge (down the Mississippi, I imagine). "One of the ethanol industry's major priorities is lobbying Congress to help pay for special pipelines to transport ethanol" (page 106).

Both political parties are complicit in fighting effective change: "Most economists argue that it is more effective to tax things we don't like (such as pollution) than to subsidize things we like (such as particular kinds of alternative energies). In 1993, the Clinton administration proposed a BTU tax...on energy sources.... This proposal was blocked by a few Democrats in Congress who represented oil-producing states and sought to protect jobs back home in alliance with Republicans who didn't want tax increases.... Raising taxes is unpopular; giving someone a subsidy is popular among its recipients -- and non recipients usually aren't aware of what's going on. Thus, as a nation, we tend to choose the economically less efficient route" (page 108).

The chapter on plant patents was particularly good, explaining the ins and outs of the legal precedents clearly. 1980 was the year when the courts first ruled that living plants could be registered with what's called a "utility patent," the type of patent that is given for other types of invention. (A lesser type of patent had been available for plants and bacteria earlier than this.) Utility patents are the ones that let Monsanto sue farmers whose plants were inadvertently cross-pollinated with patented genetically modified plants growing nearby.

Where has all the clover gone? In a bit of anti-synergy, use of the herbicide 2,4-D led to the increased use of chemical fertilizer. 2,4-D came into wide use at the same time as mass suburbanization, and was popular to contain dandelions and other weeds, but at the same time it killed the clover that used to be a normal part of lawns. "Clover is a plant that collects nitrogen from the air and, when it is cut, provides that much-needed nitrogen to the grass as it grows. Without clover, grass needs fertilizers" (page 186).

Other public policy topics in the book include organic food, genetic engineering, fertilizer runoff, invasive plants, and global warming.

Gillman is a horticulture professor the University of Minnesota and Heberlig is in political science at the University of North Carolina Charlotte, so their varying knowledge bases make for an interesting mix. But the book reads less engagingly than its subtitle -- Superweeds, Frankenfoods, Lawn Wars, and the (Nonpartisan) Truth About Enviromental Policies -- suggests. Still worth checking out, but I'd recommend not judging this book by its cover.

Ellen Raskin's Legacy at the Milwaukee Public Library

We braved the rain and 34 degree temperature to walk around downtown Milwaukee. Our destination point was the Milwaukee Public Library, which we had visited briefly once before. There wasn't any particular reason to go there -- I just like libraries, and have found that visiting the main library while on vacation often results in interesting finds, like J.R.R. Tolkien's Father Christmas book in Iowa City.

The Milwaukee library held an even greater treat for an Ellen Raskin-lover like me. I knew, of course, that Raskin was born and raised in Milwaukee, but I didn't know the children's room has a whole wall of books by Milwaukee authors, including Raskin. And not only that, but most of her books are signed, with an author's illustration on the title page.


I know Raskin's four novels well, but I've never seen her picture books.


After illustrating over a thousand books in 15 years, she published her first book in 1966: Nothing Ever Happens on My Block (1966).


Her second book is called Spectacles (1968), and it tells the story of a little girl named Iris who needs glasses. Before she gets them, she misperceives much of what she sees -- a concept alluded to in the illustration stamped into the cloth binding. (She would see it as a dog, but it's actually a girl in a bathtub.)


This book has just a simple dedication and signature. The fuzzy type is in the style of some of the inside illustrations simulating how Iris sees the world.


Raskin's drawings are super fun.


Here, Iris tries on different glasses.


Her next book, A & THE (1970), highlights Raskin's delight in typographic jokes.


And it also has a nice illustration on the title page.

It was just after this that Raskin published her first novel, The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I Mean Noel) (1971), so I would assume she was working on it at the same time.

The next picture book was also published in 1971.


The World's Greatest Freak Show is, in my opinion, the meatiest of Raskin's picture books.


With a four-footed author illo on the title page!


The story tells of Alastair, a good-looking young man who recruits a group of "freaks" (two-headed man, etc.) to appear in a show in a nearby country.


Little does Alastair suspect, but the country's entire population is made up of people who would usually be considered freaks, and he's the one who is considered to be a freak.


The freaks he had recruited for the show all live happily ever after.

I have my theories about how Freak Show's story would have resonated for Raskin, as a Jew from German Milwaukee, an art geek, and a woman with a chronic, disabling illness.


Franklin Stein (1972) was published next.


The characters in this book resemble those in Leon (I Mean Noel) the most.


1973's Who, Said Sue, Said Whoo? returns to a lighter story.


And features an owlish author illustration on the title page.


Moose, Goose and Little Nobody (1976) feels stylistically very similar to Who, Said Sue.


This is one of the few books where Raskin's signature is on a blank page.


The building drawings recall the details of Nothing Ever Happens on My Block. The use of solid ink colors is stunning.


Raskin's final picture book (1976) is tremendous fun, full of details and visual jokes. The lettering is excellent, too.


A curly-haired pig adorns the opening page, along with her signature.


The title page has little signs in the corners that say "Welcome to Title Page" and "You are now leaving Title Page."


The book is full of amazing pen and ink drawings, colored in bright ink, but this page near the end combines so many details, along with this bizarre Santa-clad ape, that I had to include it here.

Raskin would have been working on her Newbery-winning The Westing Game (1978) as these last two books were printed. Looking at the library's collection of books made me think about Raskin's exacting standards for the printing of her books. The color on the pages is perfectly printed -- there's not a registration error to be seen, and there's a lot of tight registration required.

Ellen Raskin's books are an inspiration for many reasons -- craftsmanship, humor, and most of all, creativity. It's always good to be reminded of the beauty and grace that people are capable of.

I'm so glad I didn't let the rain keep me from visiting the Milwaukee Public Library.

Glimpses of Madison

Not surprisingly, it was cold and rainy in Madison, too. Trying to stay dry, we visited the art department at the University, and saw a lot of student work in the hallways. Most of it was what you might expect -- charcoals, collages, serigraphs, and lithographs on a range of subjects. My eye (of course) gravitated to the works that resonated with current politics in Wisconsin.


Among a set of stencil works was this commentary on the governor's decision to turn down federal money for high-speed rail.

The posted graphic design assignments were quite nice -- identity work and environmental graphics, mostly. But there were also some broadsides displaying typefaces designed by students. The professor asked them to do their final presentations using the words from their favorite protest sign from the Capitol protests.


Font name: Fading Beauty.


Font name: Odjit Regular


Font name: Carolina


Font name: Nailed Regular


I liked this sign, which was attached to one of the art classroom doors.

A short visit to Memorial Library made it clear there are a lot of books in Madison. It's one of those libraries that keep the books in stacks, where two floors of shelves fit into each story, and the stairs between are narrow, metal structures, just wide enough for one person.


There is an elevator, of course. This old painted sign still proclaims the presence of a phone that's not needed in the age of the cell phone. Note the bit of grafitti at lower right.


Wandering through the stacks, my eye fell on these two shelves of books by a writer named Katharine Tynan. There were dozens of titles that, judging from their spines, were published in the late 19th or early 20th century. Checking the Wikipedia, I see that Tynan was an Irish writer who published over a hundred books, and was part of literary circles that included Hopkins and Yeats. But I've never heard of her.


The spines are charming. I will have to look into her work -- it sounds like a few are available on Project Gutenberg.


Because The Handsome Quaker was such an interesting title, I chose that one to look at more closely, and noted the small words beneath the author's name: (Mrs. Hinkson). Can't think of too many authors today who would list there name in that fashion today.


We visited the Capitol for just a little while, and spotted this window on the way in.


At the metal detectors, I was amused and a bit horrified by this sign that prohibits everything from balloons to easels, such as the one the sign is sitting on. And it's good to know that snakes aren't allowed unless they're service animals.

Things were quiet in the Capitol, as far as I could see. We were too early for the Solidarity Singalong, which was going to start at noon. There were signs about cuts to libraries. And one man sat against a stone pillar with a sign saying he was conducting a hunger strike (day 18).

No sign of tape damage, not surprisingly. As I had just read in Madison's Isthmus paper, it's looking like the damage estimates weren't just inflated, they were completely fabricated. A local stone contractor brought in by the paper to inspect the building had this to say about it:

The painter's tape used to affix signs left "little or no residue" anywhere. The worst problem he saw was some residue where media had taped cords to the floor, but even this was easily removed with simple cleaning agents.

"There's no damage to the stone," says Arndt, who has been back in the building several times since, verifying this finding. He says the [Department of Administration] official who showed him around agrees even the lower cost estimate is "completely ridiculous and politically inspired."

Milwaukee Art Museum on a Rainy Day

It's raining in Milwaukee (and sort of snowing), so that makes it a good time to go to a museum. I've never been to the Milwaukee Art Museum before.

Thankfully, MAM is one of the museums that allows anyone to shoot nonflash photos of the works, so I have some things to share.


The Calatrava addition to the museum is a work of art itself. Thought it's hard not to wonder how they keep all that whiteness clean.


The special exhibition hall, across the wide atrium.


The prow of the addition extends out to the edge of Lake Michigan.


In the midst of all that whiteness, this glass work by Dale Chihuly is startling.

We didn't visit the Frank Lloyd Wright exhibit, preferring to check out the exhibits in the main building. First, the Modern Design collection.


What decade would you guess this settee dates from? I would have thought the 1920s or 30s. But no -- it's from 1825-30 Vienna.


The design pieces were generally grouped by color, including this odd couple -- Frank Lloyd Wright's 1921-22 Peacock Chair beside Eero Saarinen's Pastille chair from 1968.

We spent a lot of time looking at paintings from many different eras, but I'll spare you those photos.


This is the Infinity Cube. I didn't note the artist's name, but it's a black box with mirrors and lights that's quite disconcerting to spend time in.


This pixellated portrait of Madam C.J. Walker, by Sonya Clark, was quite striking and the closer I got to it, the more interesting it got.


Walker was the first black female millionaire, and she made her money in hair products for black women. Clark used black plastic combs as her medium.

MAM has a nice collection of folk art on display as well. Many interesting figural sculptures, but here are two painted works:


Morris Hirshfield, Landscape with House II, 1940.


John Perates, Madonna and Child, also 1940. I love the staring eyes and the miniature figures that frame the main image. It has the feel of being made from bottle caps, even though it's not.


The museum's logo gives another idea of what the building looks like from the outside. All in all, it's a good museum, well worth a visit.