Noses

I just saw these two tweets next to each other on Twitter:



They showed up together in the midst of an outrage flood over the most recently discussed killing of a black man by authorities (Eric Harris, unarmed and shot with a gun by a cop who meant to use a taser...another cop later said "f*#k your breath" when Harris said he couldn't breathe as he was dying) and people waiting for Hillary Clinton's announcement.

What a strange world.

How to Make a Book Look Like Something Teens Wouldn't Want to Read

I don't pay much attention to young adult book covers these days. I know what I like (such as the covers of Rainbow Rowell's books), and on average, my sense is that covers are more engaging than they used to be, with a higher average level of aesthetics.

These are a few recent covers discussed on a blog about 2015 covers:




Clearly, there are a lot of hand-drawn letters, bright colors, and strong graphic shapes. This is just a small sample, and they don't all have these elements, but I think we can agree they don't look anything like this cover from a new Avi book that I saw yesterday on the shelf at Common Good Books in St. Paul:


The art style could maybe be okay for a contemporary cover, but the white Brush Script type and the heavy sans serif with its dark to light orange gradation both scream their allegiance to another decade, or maybe a designer who's not paying attention. Is it supposed to look retro? If so, is it an era that appeals to young people? I don't think so.

I know I am over-sensitive to type, but I think you don't have to know the names of the fonts to realize this type is completely wrong on a cover meant for young people.

Dandelion Honey Poster

I love everything about this poster: the event it's for, how it looks, and the sponsors:


The look is clearly a reference to A.M. Cassandre, without copying any single one of his works. The color is perfect, and best of all is the way the bees are arranged as parts of a dandelion seed head, being blown off into the wind by the stylized—but clearly female—chef.

The only thing wrong with this artwork is that I can't figure out who made it on the Beez Kneez site or in the Seward Co-op newsletter where I originally saw it.

Please Don't Shoot Me

Why isn't this the biggest story in the country? From the Los Angeles Times:

Nearly 9% of Americans are angry, impulsive—and have a gun, study says

Tread lightly, Americans: Nearly 9% of people in the United States have outbursts of anger, break or smash things, or get into physical fights -- and have access to a firearm, a new study says. What's more, 1.5% of people who have these anger issues carry their guns outside the home.

The findings, published Wednesday in the journal Behavioral Sciences and the Law, suggest that measures to reduce gun injuries and deaths should focus less on diagnosed mental illness and more on a history of violent behavior.

The new research also indicates that the 310 million firearms estimated to be in private hands in the United States are disproportionately owned by people who are prone to angry, impulsive behavior and have a potentially dangerous habit of keeping their guns close at hand. That's because people owning six or more guns were more likely to fall into both of these categories than people who owned a single gun.

In 2012, 11,622 people in the United States were killed by a firearm discharged during an intentional act of violence, and an additional 57,077 were injured. Although mass shootings have focused lawmakers' attention on the need to keep guns out of the hands of those with a serious mental illness, the new study implies that doing so would make only a small dent in this tally of morbidity and mortality.

Researchers from Duke, Harvard and Columbia Universities analyzed data gleaned from 5,563 face-to-face interviews conducted as part of a nationwide survey of mental disorders back in the early 2000s. The study authors say they are the first to estimate the overlap between gun access and a history of angry, impulsive behavior—with or without a diagnosable mental illness.

Fewer than one in 10 of those angry people with access to guns had ever been admitted to a hospital for a psychiatric or substance abuse problem, the study found.

Their behavioral history might suggest a propensity for violence, according to the study. But nothing in their medical histories would bar them from legally purchasing guns under existing mental health related restrictions.

 Emphasis added throughout.

Oddballs

Today I've got two objects I saw in the world of retail -- one beautiful, the other ridiculous.


I saw this cover in a used bookstore, and loved the use of negative space, especially the H and O. I wish I'd noted the publication date; some time around 1965, I'd guess.


The subtlety of the book cover is quite a contrast with this current bit of work. Hooter Hiders -- give me a break. How many women think of their breasts as hooters? Nursing covers may be wanted by some women, but the name is stupid and insulting. And the company name Bébé au Lait isn't so great, either -- it's more a mixed metaphor than a clever quip. (The product, according to the Guardian, "is a giant tent with a rigid neckline, allowing you to look down at your baby while wearing the maternal equivalent of clown trousers.")

Tabs, Post-Travel

For me, traveling is highly correlated with an increasing number of tabs left open in my browser. Time to clear out a few.

From the New York Times magazine: The Brain's Empathy Gap. What's particularly cool about this article on implicit bias is that it mostly focuses on anti-Roma oppression in Hungary, rather than our own national anti-black bias. Which made me uncomfortable... a good feeling. The researcher at the core of the story is trying to figure out why empathy only goes so far, and can even work against seeing the "other" as fully human. One clue: if you've had an experience of your own where you were treated unfairly solely because of what you are, you may be able to have true empathy for oppressed others:

Bruneau [the researcher]....asked a question: What made her, an educated white woman, take up the Roma cause? This gave Magyar pause. After a brief silence, she explained that she grew up in a city close to the Austrian border and that she always felt like an outsider when her family would cross over to go shopping. Daroczi couldn’t help interjecting; after the fall of communism, he said, Hungarians crossed the border in droves, mostly to purchase basic goods. “It was written in Hungarian on the walls of the shops, ‘Hungarians: don’t steal!’ ” he said.

“It felt shameful,” Magyar added, nodding. “I think that really affected me.” Bruneau lit up at the anecdote; it was very similar to the stories he’d collected from other non-Roma activists. He told Magyar and Daroczi about the brain scans of the Israeli peace activists — the blue dots in a sea of red — and about his desire to somehow array the power of their experiences toward intervention efforts.

Here's a tab I should have mentioned in my earlier post about W. Kamau Bell and his young daughter's future preschool options: Why preschool shouldn't be like school (from Slate). It reports two unrelated experiments where 4-year-olds were either directly taught about how a toy worked or mostly left to figure it out for themselves. In both cases, the directly taught children explored the toy less and found out less about how it worked.

Another article to put into the "why do drivers think bicyclists are all scofflaws" folder: Let's talk seriously about why cyclists break traffic laws (from the Washington Post). "Most of us, whatever mode we travel, break the law at some point..., whether we're driving five miles over the speed limit, or crossing the street against the crosswalk. And yet, we tend not to treat lead-footed drivers with the same disapproval as cyclists who ride through stop signs, even though the former behavior is potentially more publicly harmful than the latter."

"You’re putting people on bikes in transportation systems that are entirely built for cars. If that seems to be one of the reasons why people are behaving this way, that would lend an argument to better bike infrastructure," Marshall says. ....I'll admit in the back of my own mind that I also sometimes disregard traffic laws not for my personal safety, but because I know that traffic laws, like road infrastructure, weren't created with cyclists in mind. And I say this as a car-owning cyclist, not a culture warrior: It seems somehow unjust — for reasons that Marshall's research may better articulate than me — to expect cyclists to follow all the rules of cars (no turn on red) while denying cyclists the same courtesies (like the right to occupy a full lane).

Self-cleaning solar panels are on the horizon. Good for keeping off the dust of desert areas, for sure... I wonder what happens with snow?

Single parent or poverty? Study looks at which affects good parenting most. The Right would argue that kids need two parents, since poverty is correlated with single-parenthood. Matt Bruenig would argue that single parents (and all parents) need substantial child-based income supports and then they can be good parents.

David Roberts announced on Twitter today that he's jumping journalistic ships from Grist to Vox, starting in about three weeks. Good luck to him. Here's an article of his from back in January called We can solve climate change, but it won’t be cheap or easy. It summarizes an academic article out of MIT on the cost of decarbonizing the economy (50 to 90 percent by mid-century). "In short, if we want a 100 percent renewables world, with no coal, gas, or nuclear, we’ll need to build more power generation capacity, faster, than at any time in history."

Oh, the eternal question, What's worth learning in school?

"Knowledge is for going somewhere," [David] Perkins says, not just for accumulating. But too often, we tend to focus on short-term successes — scoring well on a quiz, acing a spelling test. Unfortunately all of that test knowledge, all of that accumulated knowledge we thought was worth knowing, becomes useless if not used....

Historically, the first 12 or so years of schooling have focused on educating for the known, “the tried and true, the established canon,” he writes. “This made very good sense in the many periods and places where most children’s lives were likely to be more or less like their parents’ lives. However, wagering that tomorrow will be pretty much like yesterday does not seem to be a very good bet today. Perhaps we need a different vision of education, a vision that foregrounds educating for the unknown as much as for the known.”

And to do that, Perkins says we need to rethink what’s worth learning and what’s worth letting go of — in a radical way.

For example, rather than just learning facts about the French Revolution, students should learn about the French Revolution as a way to understand issues like world conflict or poverty or the struggle between church and state. Without those connections, Perkins says he’s not surprised that so many people have trouble naming things they learned early on that still have meaning today or that disengaged students are raising their hands, asking why they need to know something.

One more for the implicit bias pile: Lighter skinned blacks and hispanics are seen as being more intelligent (Pacific Standard magazine). White poll-takers conducting he National Election Study (a face-to-face survey) were themselves surveyed about 223 African Americans or Hispanics they had surveyed.

The interviewers were instructed to list each person's skin tone on a 10-point scale....[and were] asked to gauge each person's "apparent intelligence" on a five-point scale from "very low" to "very high." "Interviewers were not allowed to opt out," Hannon notes. "Thus the question can be seen as tapping into deep prejudices."

The results suggest it did just that.

"African Americans and Latinos deemed to have lighter skin tones were significantly more likely to be seen as intelligent by white interviewers," Hannon reports. Further analysis found the interviewers had a distinct tendency to "look at two identically qualified minorities and assess the lighter skinned one as more intelligent."

"Importantly, the effects of skin tone on intelligence assessment were independent of respondent education level, vocabulary test score, political knowledge assessment, and other demographic factors," he adds.

I highly recommend this American Radio Works documentary on the Perry Preschool experiment. It was this early-1960s research that originally showed providing a quality early-learning experience for kids from poor families paid off for them and society by decreasing later costs (like prison!). The thing that I found most informative was how the teachers ran the school -- it sounds like just the type of free and exploratory setting young kids need. And the teachers also got to know the parents and understand where the kids came from. An exemplar to this day.

Next time you hear that a new technology spells the end of all that civilization holds dear, check out this illustrated timeline of doomsayers since 1494. Printing will make books "too disposable," people reading newspapers will be sitting in "sullen silence," radios and the "incredible rattle and bang of jazz" foretell the death of conversation.

A former Libertarian writes about his trip to Honduras and how he saw what a stateless state looks like. It's not pretty. Everyone with any means has walls and hired guns surrounding them at every moment.

Honduras has problems but people should go visit anyway and soon. The dangers are fleeting, and there are coffee plantations to tour, ruins to see, cigars to smoke and fish to catch. The people need your tourism dollars. As a bonus, it’s important for Americans to see the outcome when the bad ideas of teenage boys and a bad Russian writer are put into practice. Everyone believes in freedom, but it’s an idea both fetishized and unrecognizable when spouted by libertarians. There can be no such thing as freedom, safety or progress of any kind, when an entire society is run for the benefit of a handful of rich assholes and global conglomerates. If you think I’m overstating it, just go to Honduras and see it for yourself.

A brief rumination on why it's easy to hate the poor. Which ties in with the common aversion many middle-class (let alone upper-class) people have to taking the bus:

[T]he hatred of public transportation is intimately tied with the hatred of the poor. Middle-class types who are unfortunate enough to use the bus expose themselves to the talk, the begging, the bad health of the poor. But instead of blaming the society, they blame the form of transportation. The unpleasant practices connected with poverty thus reinforce a generalized sign system that identifies these practices not with social conditions but with individuals. Poverty is identified as a "life choice." The use of food stamps, a character flaw. You notice chicken bones under a bus seat. The hatred grows. 

Poor women don't get pregnant because they don't care as much about preventing it as more-well-off women. They don't have sex outside of marriage anymore than well-off women, either. They just have bad access to effective contraception.

Human composting -- it's the future for our bodies if we want our memorials to be as green as possible. The Urban Death Project -- a somewhat bad name, in my opinion -- recently launched its Kickstarter campaign to raise $75,000 (it's a bit more than half way to its goal). The project would create a facility that allows for ceremonial space as well as safe composting of bodies, which break down to organic matter in just a few weeks:

The facility is essentially an enclosed building with a three-story “core” filled with organic material and encircled by a sloping walkway. During your funeral service, your body would be shrouded in linen and your friends and family would walk you to the top of the core and lay you within the soil.

“Bodies, our bodies,” Spade says, “will be laid into the ground and covered with wood chips. There would also be some other carbon materials that would help the process work a little more efficiently, like sawdust, which is very high-carbon, and possibly something like alfalfa straw.”

Afterward, family or friends can pick up the compost and use it anywhere you want to grow plants -- in a memorial garden, or just as part of the everyday growing world.

This Sean McElwee story from Salon (“Race is being used to wreck the middle class”: The silent bigotry of America’s poverty politics) compiles a lot of stats on how greater levels of racism (or even just greater racial diversity) correlate with decreased support for social welfare programs. Despite the indisputable fact that less than 5 percent of benefits recipients spend 10 consecutive years in the program (and that almost half of Americans will receive benefits at some point in their lives), "The idea of welfare dependence [was] invented by rich Republicans to gut the social safety net."

There are still lots more tabs... but that's probably enough for today!

Chasing the Scream

Journalist Johan Hari knows all the arguments against decriminalizing or legalizing drugs. He even agreed with a lot of them. In his book Chasing the Scream, he thoroughly examines them and comes out on the side of Carl Hart, Bruce Alexander, Portugal, and Uruguay: prohibition doesn't work, addiction is not what we have been told it is, and there is a better way.

So many things to learn! For instance:

• physical dependency is the least of the problem with drugs like heroin
• the U.S. drug war's roots in the early 20th century go back not just to racism (Negro cocaine fiends, Mexican reefer madness, Chinese opium dens) but class hatred and fear of contamination and communism
• the drug war was furthered by criminal elements that wanted drugs to be illegal so they could profit in the underworld economy
• a famous (infamous) member of Congress was a heroin addict... who ended up getting his drugs supplied by the head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics
• when drugs (or alcohol) are made illegal, the strength of the substances goes up because sellers need more bang for the buck to compensate for the risks. The most popular alcoholic drink was beer before Prohibition, but soon it was whiskey; the legal, low doses of cocaine and opium that were in drinks and nostrums through the 1910s were replaced by heroin and other high-dose drugs after the Narcotics Act of 1914

The obvious solution, it appears to me, is to completely decriminalize drugs and provide prescriptions to addicts (within a universal health care system), in order to undercut the illegal suppliers -- whose businesses are based in violence -- and prevent for-profit corporations from muscling in to promote drugs the way they promote beer. This is being done in Switzerland with great success, and has been tried out in parts of the U.K. as well.

Remember what happened right after the U.S. ended alcohol prohibition? All those Capone-style gang wars went away, and the next wave of real gang problems rose up as the U.S. escalated under the Nixon and Reagan administrations.

Professor Jeffrey Miron of Harvard University has shown that the murder rate has dramatically increased twice in U.S. history -- and both times were during periods when prohibition was dramatically stepped up. The first is from 1920 to 1933... [the] second is from 1970 to 1990, when the prohibition on drugs dramatically escalated... By the mid-1980s, the... right-wing icon Milton Friedman calculated that it caused an additional ten thousand murders a year in the United States. That's the equivalent of more than three 9/11s every single year (page 81).

As police have found, you can't arrest your way out of drug trafficking. Not only does the crime not decrease, "Whenever [the police] force arrested gang members, it appeared to actually cause an increase in violence, especially homicides" (page 91).

Contrast that with the European and American examples where addicts have been provided the drugs they crave through clean clinics. They stop stealing to pay for their habits. They stop dying from disease and overdose, often get jobs and return to their families, and, most amazingly, even gradually stop using as they are no longer treated like pariahs.

One of Hari's key points is that humans generally take pleasure in intoxication, but the roughly 10 percent of people who become habituated to drugs are filling a hole in their lives, often from abuse of one kind or another. His description of Billie Holiday's childhood is a good example. Treating addicts like lepers is the opposite of what we need to do to end their use of drugs, he argues. To top it off, many addicts find some form of community and identity with other drug users, making it even harder to stop.

Chasing the Scream is full of evidence about what does and doesn't work when it comes to drugs. Hari spent time in northern Mexico with people whose families have been destroyed by the cartels, with former dealers and enforcers and cops who've come to believe the drug war must end.
The book is quite an achievement, journalistically. Hari has placed the original recordings from years of interviews online to back up his conclusions.

A lot of it is painful to read, but the hardest chapter of all was the one about Sheriff Joe Arpaio's methods in Arizona. I knew a bit about this; I'd heard he makes inmates wear cartoonish black-and-white striped jumpsuits, eat only baloney sandwiches, and live in tents. Dehumanizing, yes, but I hadn't realized the depths of Apaio's inhumanity and its negative consequences.

Hari spent time with a group of women prisoners serving drug sentences, who work daily in 110° heat on a chain gang. Heat exhaustion and heat stroke go unacknowledged and untreated. They then return to their living quarters, which Arpaio has referred to as his "concentration camp." These are the tents I'd heard about, unheated in winter and uncooled in summer, donated by the military (some from the Korean war). They get two meals of slop a day, "a brownish gloop of unspecified meat that Arpaio boasted to a reporter contained 'rotten' lumps, and costs at most 40 cents a meal" (page 107). As in a Dickensian debtors' prison, you can get better food from people on the outside if you have any people on the outside. During visiting hours, you can't touch anyone --  not even your kids -- and you're handcuffed to a table the whole time.

There is a properly built air-conditioned prison near Tent City, but Joe Arpaio has thrown these prisoners out of it and turned it into an animal shelter. Now dogs and cats relax in cool rooms while addicts ache in the heat and dust storms outside. The animals, he believes, deserve it (page 109).

It gets worse. In an Arizona state prison (not one of Arpaio's), Hari found out about a woman who was literally cooked alive. Imprisoned because she traded sex for meth, she was diagnosed as bipolar and appointed a guardian because she wasn't competent.  But the guards decided her suicide attempt was manipulation rather than a cry for help, so they put her in an outdoor cage in the desert on a 106° day. It was supposed to be used for no more than two hours at a time.

She asked for water, and they mocked her. When she finally collapsed, soiled in her own feces, she died with first-degree burns from the ground beneath her. After the guards called an ambulance, the paramedics were unable to get an accurate temperature because their thermometers only go to 108°.  Even her eyes had dried out.

Many of the guards who put her in the cage and left her there while she was dying are still working as guards today.

This is what happens in our country: in our names, in the name of the drug war. It's time to end it and base public policy on established facts about what works and doesn't work to make drug use even less important than alcohol use today.

The Public Library

If you love public libraries, I recommend the book The Public Library by Robert Dawson. It's mostly a photographic essay from his travels across the U.S., but it also includes short ruminations from writers like Barbara Kingsolver, Ann Patchett, Amy Tan, Philip Levine, and a number of librarians.

I appreciated that several of the essays dealt with the way public libraries have increasingly become the only place that allows homeless and often mentally ill people a place to be. The book also covers the closing of libraries in hollowed-out small towns and bankrupt cities, the role of libraries in maintaining civic memories, and how they've had to change with technology.

A few favorite facts:

Identifying the first public lending library is a bit disputed. The Franklin, Massachusetts, library (1778) says it's first, but it wasn't financially supported by the public. The Darby Free Library (Pennsylvania) also says it was first (in continuous operation since 1743), but its funding sources from the early decades are not mentioned. It sounds like most people agree the Peterborough Town Library in New Hampshire (1833) was the first public lending library that was funded by a common tax on the people of the town.

Once that library set the standard, the model spread rapidly across the country. (This kind of viral spread of institutions fascinates me. The YMCA, for instance, was founded in 1844 in London; by 1851 there were chapters in 10 countries. The first natural food co-op opened around 1970, and by 1975 there hundreds across the country -- dozens in the Twin Cities alone. I know that it's a human tendency for us to copy each other, but opening an organization and constructing a building take a lot more effort than switching a hairstyle.)

The Seattle central library -- the one with the unfriendly doors -- opened in 2004 and was designed by a pair of Dutch architects. It is considered a tourist draw (and I agree, it's worth a visit, as long as you can find the door).

A librarian from Troy, Michigan, wrote in 1971 to dozens of authors and other prominent people and asked them to send a message to the child readers at the library. She got responses from almost a hundred, including Isaac Asimov, E.B. White, and Neil Armstrong. I liked this one from Dr. Seuss the best:

Jumbo Boxes All the Same

I like to gripe about the floor plans that are written up in the Star Tribune's Sunday Homes section. Today's paper brings readers a more coherent critique of today's home-building milieu from the out-going dean of the architecture school at the University of Minnesota.


Tom Fisher notes that there were 430 houses on the recent Parade of Homes, and 427 of them had multiple gables. They have, he writes,

an almost mind-numbing sameness..., with asymmetrical facades, sprawling floor plans, and big roofs, with gable-on-gable-on-gable. Even the lowest priced home, at $142,100, features the seemingly mandatory gable-on-gable look, as if a kind of architectural gang signal.

Don’t get me wrong; I have nothing against gables. But most of the gables on the houses in the Parade of Homes serve no purpose whatsoever, except to increase the cost of construction, the expense of the roof, and — worst of all — the likelihood that their multiple valleys and flashings will someday leak.

And they put all of that gabling in the front:

Most of the Parade homes literally put up a facade. Walk around them and you will often find much plainer side and rear elevations, as if “curb appeal” has become all that matters, with much less attention paid to what the neighbors see or think.

The gables are often flattened against the massive roofs. I couldn't help thinking about the faces of Persian cats, from the way Fisher described the look.

Worst of all, only two houses on the tour "came in under the affordable purchase price of a house by a family of four with our area’s median income." Often the garages are larger than the average home of 50 years ago.

Variety is what people want in housing stock, Fisher concludes, and affordability is what they need. It's time builders started giving it to us.

___

Star Tribune photo by Jim Gehrz. 

___

P.S. Today's Sunday Homes section featured a house plan that looked very similar to the photo (although it only had three or four gables). It also has a master bathroom as large as the master bedroom and the most illogical arrangement of the secondary bedrooms I think I've ever seen in a modern house plan.

I Never Thought Flexible Would Become a Dirty Word

A letter from today's Star Tribune:

Why aren’t people lining up to fill jobs? Flextime may be a culprit

While the April 1 article about high job vacancies blames low pay, there is another huge reason why so many of these positions are not sought after — the abomination known as flexible scheduling. In essence, the positions require that the employee work entirely at the whim of management. Typically, a flextime contract specifies things like this:

• You will be guaranteed a minimum of eight hours’ work per week but must be prepared to work up to 32.
• If you are scheduled but are not needed, you will be called and told to stay home, unpaid.
• If you come in to work at a scheduled time and are not needed, you will be sent home early and paid for the hours actually worked.
• Your work times can vary by length and time frame. (For example, you may be scheduled to work two hours in the morning one day, then six hours in the evening the next and so on).
• If the employer is short-staffed and you are already at work, you will be required to stay extra, up to 16 hours continuously. If you refuse to stay more than twice, you will be fired.
• If the employer is short-staffed at any time, you will be called and required to come in to work. If you refuse more than twice, you will be fired.
• You can be fired at any time without prior notice for any reason or no reason at all.

If employers wonder why no one is leaping to work for them, they should ask themselves if they would work like this. Somehow, I seriously doubt it.

Sharon L. Casey, St. Paul

Those are some crazy rules. "Flexible" is one of those words that seems like a universal good, but when I think of flexible hours at a job, I think it means the employee has some leeway --  not this bizarro-world described by Sharon Casey. 

All of us who are not affected by this kind of change in employment practices need to remember that things today are not as they were 30 years ago. It's similar to the way the college debt crisis has arisen:

• tuition, room, and board are disproportionately more expensive
• the minimum wage is worth much less
• out-right financial aid has dried up in favor of unsubsidized loans 

College was a lot easier to afford 35 years ago, believe me. Similarly, the idea that people should just "go get a job" and all their problems will be solved misses these major changes in the employer-employee compact. This is one of the key attributes of the precariat. You can't arrange child care, go to school, or have any kind of life with a schedule that varies that much, and note that it's clearly nowhere near full-time, either, so you also can't pay your bills.

It's all part of the "race to the bottom" approach to running a country that has been in force since the Reagan Revolution.

Learning a Little About Jane Dornacker

Back in the 1980s, I knew a person whose answering-machine message said something like this:

The best way to make sure the plane you're on isn't blown up by a bomb is to bring a bomb yourself, because the odds that there would be two bombs on the plane are perishingly small.

I thought about that last night when I learned about the sad ending to the life of Jane Dornacker. She was a rock musician and writer, actor, and comedian, who later became a traffic reporter at a New York radio station. Which involved helicopters, of course.

According to the Wikipedia,

In 1986, while working for WNBC 660 AM Radio in New York City (which became WFAN in 1988), Dornacker was aboard during two unrelated crashes of the helicopters leased to WNBC. She survived the first crash, but was killed in the second crash into the Hudson River, which occurred as she was in the middle of a live traffic report. Her death came shortly after that of her husband, Bob Knickerbocker, orphaning their 16-year-old daughter.

Two unrelated crashes... you survive the first one, but get killed six months later in a second crash. And both just after your husband had died.

Dornacker swam her way out of the first crash, and the second crash (which ended right along the shoreline) happened while she was on the air. Her final words were "Hit the water! Hit the water! Hit the water!"

I also found this:

Leila Jane Dornacker...was credited in 1968 as the nation's first female mail carrier; she was elected homecoming queen her freshman year at San Francisco State, campaigning on campus from inside a birdcage. Jane was a slim costume chameleon inside the six-foot frame of a dancer. When Jane performed, you got full-body. Dornacker won San Francisco's Golden Cabaret Award three consecutive years for best female comedian.

Her acting credits are mostly on stage, but she had a memorable role in the movie The Right Stuff. She sang lead on a song by R. Crumb, and wrote a song for The Tubes.

Her daughter, Naomi Knickerbocker Dornacker, received $325,000 from the company that leased (and badly maintained) the helicopter to the radio station. Not much in exchange for the life of your only parent.

Born around 1970, she's about 45 now and according to this site, lives in Lake Tahoe. I hope her life is fulfilling.

Three from Target

These three photos are from a recent trip to Target, a place that has gotten almost too self-consciously consumerist, if that's possible:


Which is it, Target? It can't be both. Or can it? Baudrillard would be proud.


Yes, that's what's needed. More focus on me. I am the center of the universe, after all, and deserve to buy myself everything in this store.


These two outfits were hanging in the dressing room. Interesting how the guy clothes are multi-layered and very modest, while the gal clothes have not only shorter shorts but a see-through top. What do young women wear under these transparent clothes? (I'm aware that I sound like a person frowning while saying, "Kids these days.") Does anyone actually wear these?