More Hot Air: The Original Sunheat

In last Sunday's USA Weekend magazine (the poor cousin of Parade magazine), there was an ad for yet another space heater, this time "The Original Sunheat."

This ad is much more clever than the ones for EdenPure or the Amish mantle doodad, for a couple of reasons:

• It doesn't try so hard. There are no models dressed as Amish girls or happy homeowners toasting their toes in front of the heater. It looks very no-nonsense, communicating a no-frills approach. Hey, I thought, this one might actual be a decent buy.
• It has a Better Business Bureau logo prominently located in the top right corner
• It clearly tells you what company is responsible for the product, gives their location (Grand Island, Nebraska -- about as "real America" as you can get!) and closes with "Family Owned Since 1954."

As I learned earlier from Karen Youso's first and second columns on space heater topics in the Star Tribune, you can buy one of three heaters rated as best by Consumer Reports for under $100. So I set off to see how much this honest-looking Sunheat box cost.

I was quickly disappointed, I'm sorry to say. Looking at the Sunheat website, I found the model shown in the ad in their online store for almost $680. I could pay for a lot of natural gas instead for that amount!

So what about that Better Business Bureau logo? They endorse the company behind Sunheat, right?

Well, no. According to their page on the Nebraska BBB site, T&R Distributing, the sellers of Sunheat, are "BBB accredited," which means they will answer complaints made to the BBB and try to rectify them. There have been 32 complaints in the last three years, some rectified, but many dropped because the customer did not follow through.

Just to clear things up, the BBB site states: "As a matter of policy, BBB does not endorse any product, service or business."

Accreditation is obviously a step up from the complete dishonesty of Arthur Middleton company and its Universal Media Syndicate, promoters of the Amish heaters and other scams, but it doesn't absolve T&R for selling a severely over-priced product... which the BBB site notes is made in China, so it's not like our money would be creating living wage manufacturing jobs down there in Grand Island, Nebraska.

There's a whole lot of shamelessness to go around in the space heater racket, stretching from Nebraska to the "Amish" in Ohio to Michigan's EdenPure.

And by the way -- if you really want to buy a space heater, the top-rated, affordable brands from the Consumer Reports story are Honeywell, Holmes and DeLonghi.

Rocky Mountain News, 1859 - 2009

Taxation with or without Representation

It may be unusual for someone in Minnesota to care about giving people who live within the bounds of Washington, D.C. a voting seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. But aside from the obvious injustice of it, I experienced it first-hand when I lived and worked in Washington in my mid-20s.


Washington -- which was originally established without regard to the fact that human beings would actually live in it (aside from the residents of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue) -- had absolutely no extra-local voting rights until the 23rd Amendment was enacted in 1961, giving the District three seats in the Electoral College. That's the same number of seats as is held by a number of states with small populations, and it's the equivalent of how many members of Congress those states have -- two Senators and one Representative.

In case you didn't already know this, D.C. has 600,000 residents, more than the populations of four states (Alaska, North Dakota, Wyoming and Vermont). It lost more soldiers in Vietnam than at least five states, as I recall learning when I lived there, but can't find the list of states now. And those soldiers (or their parents) had no right to vote for a member of the legislative body that sent them to war with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.

In case you haven't heard about what's going on recently with this topic (see the New York Times for the story), Congress is probably going to pass a bill that gives D.C. a voting seat, and that also adds a single seat to the state with the most population growth (currently Utah -- which has the added political benefit of balancing extremely Democratic D.C. with extremely Republican Utah, making the deal palatable to those who have long blocked D.C. statehood).

This deal is a bit funky, I have to admit. Basically, they're inflating the set number of representatives by two, which I gather is within their purview. What may not be constitutionally allowed (and court challenges will examine this) is whether Congress can allocate a voting seat to an entity that is not a state.

But this may be the best way to get to the real goal, which is statehood for D.C. If the people of D.C. are given voting rights, and then have them taken away because of court action, it might actually wake up the rest of the country to the fact that this injustice has been occurring all along, and we could finally pass a constitutional amendment making D.C. a state. (And why not Puerto Rico, too?)

Are We Still in America? Yes - Free Speech Included

Today's Star Tribune reported on an odd confrontation at a Minnesota Senate hearing on Tuesday.

A U of M civil engineering professor, Julian Marshall, was beginning his testimony on some research findings about reducing carbon emissions and the number of miles driven in Minnesota, and thought he would lighten things up by showing a slide that juxtaposed the classic World War II car sharing poster with the more recent Bill Maher book cover.

Watch out, professor Marshall -- that is a dangerous and un-American thing to say, or even think, despite the fact that it was a common idea, promulgated by U.S. Printing Office during World War II. Senator Julianne Ortman, R-Chanhassen, interrupted Marshall, exclaiming, "Are we still in America?" and saying that the graphics were offensive "to every person who drives a car."

As one commenter on the Strib site put it, "It seems the people most in need of parody least appreciate it."

Evident Video Genius

I heard about this video from a friend. It's for a song called Evident Utensil, by a band called Chairlift. And if that was all there was to it, I wouldn't care, being too old to be into bands, I'm sorry to say.

But the video is amazing, using the kind of compression artifacts you often see in web-based video to make a visual statement. It's what the hybrid offspring of mpeg-4 and a 1968 Fillmore West poster might be, if you crossed your eyes just a bit.

And the song isn't bad, either.



(Sorry, the extrahorizontal proportion of the video frame doesn't fit into the narrow size of my blog. If you want to see its full width, or watch it in HD, check out the YouTube page.)

Finding the Last Book

I began reading science fiction in sixth grade. A few years later, I picked up a book called This Star Shall Abide (1972), by Sylvia Louise Engdahl. I think I probably took it out of the library because it had a science fiction sticker on the spine, and because it had a cover illustration by Richard Cuffari. (Yes, I have a habit of judging books by their covers.)

I also read the book's sequel, Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains (1974). Basically, they are the story of a lost colony from a civilization whose sun went nova. By the time the story takes place, it is many generations later and the main character, Noren, is confronting the rigidity of his society, and a caste system that keeps the rural farmers working with stone age tools, while technicians come and go in air cars, and a distant City is home to mysterious people called the Scholars.

Noren doesn't believe in any of his society's religious tenets, which are based on a prophecy that foretells a bright star's appearance in the sky. On that day, the prophecy says, everyone will be equal, with access to machines and knowledge, "and Cities will rise beyond the Tomorrow Mountains." (The bright star of the prophecy is actually the light from their parent solar system's nova -- because they traveled on faster-than-light ships, the light will have taken much longer to reach the colony than their ships did.)

Noren becomes a heretic and is taken into the City, where he is interrogated by the Scholars. In classic science fiction fashion, it turns out that there's a lot more to the prophecy of the star, and there's a reason for the caste system. But the Scholars want people to become heretics and reject it all, because they know the system is wrong, even if it's necessary.

I found that idea tremendously appealing as a teenager: the concept that all the wrongs in the world were actually a test to see if we were heretical enough to reject them, and thus prove we were worthy of acceptance into something greater. Yes, I grew up in the 1970s (I was 14 during the Watergate hearings), so it may have been natural to wish there was a silver lining in all of that.

Anyway. I read and reread these two books during high school (being an inveterate re-reader). But I always felt as though they were incomplete. The second book ends with Noren realizing he really does have faith in the prophecy... an outcome against which I may have been naturally predisposed.

Then, just a few years ago, I stumbled across the third book -- The Doors of the Universe, published in 1981. It does a great job of completing the story of Noren and his planet, answering all the questions in a very satisfying way. I was so psyched to find it, and opening it was like starting up a conversation with an old friend after 20 years.

It's corny to thank authors for their writing, I suppose, but since finding Doors I've been extra thankful to Sylvia Engdahl for completing the trilogy. Sometimes I feel like she did it just for me, even though I know better.

P.S. Unfortunately, Richard Cuffari had died in 1978 at the young age of 53, so the last book is not lucky enough to have one of his cover illustrations. I really must write something about his work in another post.

Field Guide to American Houses

Over the weekend, I pulled my copy of A Field Guide to American Houses off the shelf. I read it sometime over 10 years ago, but hadn't given it much thought lately.

Wow, what a great book. Virginia and Lee McAlester provide pithy descriptions, line drawings and hundreds of photos of everything from Victorians to Prairie to suburban French provincial to Richardsonian Romanesque (I just love saying that name).

The line drawings provide details of types of windows, rooflines, shingles, chimneys, dormers as well as variations on the overall building shape for each category of houses.


If you love looking at houses, this is a great book to read and refer to as you try to figure out why houses look the way they do, and how they fit into different building and design movements.

If It's Not One Thing, It's Another

We all know newspapers are hard up for money, laying off staff, going bankrupt, and so on. This leads to a number of unintended consequences, like the increase in ads from advertisers of last resort like the Universal Media Syndicate.

It also leads the papers to put ads in places they never have before -- such as the front page, or right smack dab in the middle of a story, as the Star Tribune did in today's paper.

My jaw dropped when I saw the page. (Click on the image to see it larger.) It is wrong on so many levels:

1. The juxtaposition of photo and ad makes it appear as though Obama is looking at the ad, rather than contemplating a difficult decison.
2. The ad's placement breaks up the page so that it's not entirely clear the photo and headline above the ad go with the story below.
3. And most egregiously, the specific ad is beyond inappropriate. The antics of Dr. Seuss's Thing 1 and Thing 2 in the book The Cat in the Hat are the essence of chaos. No matter how much the fish in the pot tries to advocate for order, Thing 1 and Thing 2 run roughshod over everything in the house.
   

Wait a minute. Come to think of it, perhaps this is a sly editorial comment from the Star Tribune. Maybe the paper is making an analogy to our current economic situation!

Maybe George Bush and previous administrations are the Cat in the Hat, who have loosed the forces of economic chaos and deregulation.


Maybe Obama has a handy net to use so he can catch the miscreants before mother comes home. Let's hope so.

And then perhaps the Cat in the Hat will reappear with his magic machine to help us kids clean up the mess.

Hmmm. Guess the analogy only goes so far.

A News Trifecta: Nadya, the Banks and the RNC

The clippings have been piling up lately, so I thought I would do a bit of a rant on several topics.


Going to the dogs -- Today's Star Tribune, from the short teasers on the front page: "Animal shelters say they've been inundated with Chihuahuas discarded by fashion-conscious owners emulating pup-carrying Paris Hilton."

A sad, sad statement about shallowness and pure stupidity. This makes me think of Nadya Suleman... only she's emulating Angelina Jolie rather than Paris Hilton, and it's not dogs, it's children.


Robbing the poor to give to the rich -- Associated Press, printed in both dailies over the last few days: Thirty states have made deals with banks to distribute their unemployment benefits as debit cards, rather than as cash or checks. Seems like a good idea until you realize that the banks are charging these people -- who obviously are not rolling cash -- when they withdraw money from the cards, and even for calling to ask questions or check their card balance.

As the story said, "Some [banks] even charge overdraft fees of up to $20 -- even though they could decline charges for more than what's on the card." This is all in addition to the 1 to 3 percent banks charge to the merchant for each transaction.


Charges dropped -- Minnesota Public Radio, both dailies and the Twin Cities Daily Planet yesterday and today: All charges have been dropped against 323 people who were arrested on the final day of the Republican National Convention in St. Paul... or, as we here like to affectionately remember it, "our little police state." (These were the people who were not allowed to leave a march and were instead herded with percussion grenades onto two bridges, where a number were maced just for asking if they could leave, and numerous journalists were arrested.) So far, 75 percent of all charges that week have been dropped. As I wrote in an earlier post,

[Star Tribune columnist Nick] Coleman points out that, given the $50 million spent on security for the convention, each arrest cost $61,125, and the cost per conviction is likely to be a lot higher (I predict they'll be lucky if they come out of it with a million dollars per, and that's not counting what will be paid out in wrongful arrest lawsuits).

Let's do the math. Each remaining arrest now carries a price tag of about $245,000 (not counting prosecution costs), and I'm still betting we'll get up to at least $1 million per arrest for each conviction. Eight of the remaining cases that have not been dismissed are those against the RNC8, young people who were arrested prior to the convention, based on informants and paranoid raids.

Ramsey County sheriff Bob Fletcher has since had to admit he hid even more spending on paramilitary operations and espionage. Fletcher went on record saying he hid the spending because he didn't trust the St. Paul City Council. Welcome to America.

I can't wait for the next election to see if the people of Ramsey County can hold this guy accountable for his actions.


Update on the RNC8, Monday, Feb. 23: The Star Tribune's Feb. 18 issue carried a story about the recent arrest of one of the confidential informants in the RNC8 case. Andrew Darst, who was working for the FBI while participating in the protest planning, was arrested for breaking into a house in the western suburbs and assaulting two men. There is some speculation that this could undermine his credibility as a witness at the RNC8 trials.

Floppy Foxes

A friend told me about a Russian geneticist who was trying to breed foxes that were less fierce (so they would be easier to raise for fur coats, basically).

What he found was that in as little as 10 generations of selecting for the friendliest foxes, he not only had bred friendly animals, but also ones whose appearances had changed radically: floppy ears, coats with colors like a border collie, and more divergences from the originally homogenous stock.

Check out this three-minute snip from the PBS NOVA episode my friend had seen, which was about how dogs were bred to diverge from wolves in size, shape and color. Beware: There are many cute foxes in this video!

The Wire: A Peak Experience

[Warning: This post contains some obscenities in quoted material. Not much beyond a PG-13 rating these days, but still... fair warning.]


I recently spent a month or so watching all five seasons of the HBO series The Wire, and I have to say that it's the best thing ever made for the television.

It's laden with violence and profanity, of course, but what else would you expect from a story that's about the social devolution of the American city -- drug dealing, the loss of blue collar jobs, political corruption, police actions (both good and bad), deteriorating schools, and the implosion of the daily newspaper. All this with compelling characters, great acting and novel-quality writing set against the landscape of Baltimore.

The Wire was created by David Simon, a police reporter at the Baltimore Sun for several decades, in collaboration with Ed Burns, a former Baltimore cop and teacher. You might think their resumes would lead to something dry and clinical, but that's not what happened. (Simon wrote the book that became the television show Homicide: Life in the Streets, based in part on Burns' experiences.)

In an interview with British novelist Nick Hornby, Simon explained why The Wire is so different from most television:

My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell.

Later in the interview, Simon went on to talk about the way The Wire makes the viewer care about people (drug dealers, street kids, cops) and places (the 'hood) that normally would be ignored by a mainstream audience:

There are two ways of traveling. One is with a tour guide, who takes you to the crap everyone sees. You take a snapshot and move on, experiencing nothing beyond a crude visual and the retention of a few facts. The other way to travel requires more time -- hence the need for this kind of viewing to be a long-form series or miniseries, in this bad metaphor -- but if you stay in one place, say, if you put up your bag and go down to the local pub or shebeen and you play the fool a bit and make some friends and open yourself up to a new place and new time and new people, soon you have a sense of another world entirely. We’re after this: Making television into that kind of travel, intellectually. Bringing those pieces of America that are obscured or ignored or otherwise segregated from the ordinary and effectively arguing their relevance and existence to ordinary Americans. Saying, in effect, This is part of the country you have made. This too is who we are and what we have built.

Anyway. All I can say is, it made for a compelling 30 or so days of watching, and I actually think I'll want to watch the whole series again, sooner rather than later.

Sometime when you've got 60 hours to spend watching television, this is the one to watch. Think of it as a life-changing, three-day vacation spread over a month or two.

Andrew Mwenda, Press Hero

I knock Parade magazine a lot, I know... its beyond-kitsch and sucker-born-every-minute ads, its three-week production schedule that leads it to print news about people who've already died (remember the Benazir Bhutto profile that appeared after her assassination?), its cheesy obsession with celebrities.

But a few weeks ago, they ran an article about a Ugandan journalist named Andrew Mwenda that probably reached more people in the U.S. than anything else written about him.

Since December 2007, Mwenda has been publishing a paper in Uganda called The Independent, focused on government corruption, from human rights abuses to graft. He and the staff have been arrested, threatened, and looted. The paper is printed in a secret location. (Props to the printer as well!)

Mwenda recently won the International Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists.

At the end of the article, Mwenda is quoted as saying: “The government can jail me or even kill me, but it cannot jail or kill the values and ideas for which we stand. We are standing on the right side of history, defending freedom, liberty, and democracy at any cost.”

Press freedom stories always give me goosebumps and make me appreciate what we in the U.S. take for granted (so much so that we too often allow ourselves to be coopted into consensus, but that's another story).

I'm glad Parade gave a page to Mwenda's story. Thanks.

Elf Help

Saw this on BoingBoing... ! It's only 18 seconds long.

Tossing Some Cookies

Perhaps you've seen this ad; it's been running on a lot of sites lately.

It comes in different shapes and sizes, and it starts out showing just the photo first, and then the words appear afterward. Imagine that. What would you think it was a photo of?

Personally, the first time I saw it I couldn't figure it out in the split second I assign to things like web ads, and my mind leaped in an unfortunate direction. And it wasn't chocolate cookies, if you get my drift.

Mmmm. Think I'll start a diet right now.

Jon Tevlin -- Can't Wait to Read Your Columns

If you've ever wondered how far back my filing cabinet goes, this is your chance to get an idea.

In today's Star Tribune, the editor, Nancy Barnes, announced the names of two new columnists. Both have been at the paper for a number of years as reporters, but each had an earlier career at the local weeklies or monthlies before joining up with the Strib.

Gail Rosenblum did a wonderful stint as editor of the monthly Minnesota Parent. Jon Tevlin was on staff at the now-defunct weekly Twin Cities Reader when I first became aware of his writing. I look forward to what both of them will have to say each week.

Here, from the filing cabinet (in a folder labeled "Great Writing/Art in Media," which has now morphed into the blog's Media Goodness category) is this story by Jon Tevlin from the December 13-19, 1995 Twin Cities Reader:

Toy Story
Being a toys-for-tots kid brings joy, embarrassment and weird presents
By Jon Tevlin

In the days before Christmas they'd come dressed in long gray car coats and fedoras and rubbers that they slid over loafers. They smelled of Aqua Velva and talked in the small, measured voices that I used to hear in the back pews of the church.

I never recognized them. Later I heard that church and charity groups preferred anonymity; I guess they were doing it for us. We were on the list of local poor families who got presents and food at the holidays, and such was the shame of poverty, at least in the 1960s, that it should be handled quietly, behind closed doors and away from the curious gaze of the rest of the congregation.

If the church thought it was protecting us kids from the bitter truths, they should know that most poor kids are veterans of shame. I had years to practice the humble-yet-grateful face of a child beholden to whatever kind favor someone chose to bestow on me. I was embarrassed when my mother sent me to the store the first time with food stamps (under instruction not to buy anything conspicuous), for example, and when she sent me to pick up the government cheese, rice and honey they doled out periodically as symbolic alms to the poor.

After a while, the shame was so strong and I was so proud that I chose not to participate in our poverty. I refused to bring food stamps to the nearby Penny's Market, or pick up the free blocks of cheddar. Whenever I saw the church men coming up the steps with a bag full of Christmas presents, I did what my older brother and sister did: I hid.

It's not that we didn't appreciate the gesture. We did, and still do. They were kind people with righteous intentions doing the good deed. But the holiday charity rituals, from the receiving end, are more complex than the obligatory smiling-kid shots you see on TV at holiday time. To us, these strangers left more than gifts; they left an indelible mark about the holidays, our poverty, the nature of giving in America and the glaring discrepancy between the haves and have-nots.

Getting a few gifts was probably better for us as kids than not getting a few gifts, but, for me at least, the kindness of strangers was a kind of further evidence that somehow in this great country one of two things had happened: My parents failed me, or my country failed me. Neither option was terribly uplifting. To this day it has shaped the way I receive gifts -- awkwardly and reluctantly -- and to a certain extent the way I see the world.

The gift-getting ritual was even harder on my parents, particularly my father. He had worked the same factory job for 25-odd years before being knocked out of work by illness. The stress of the holidays was actually compounded, I think, by the sight of good-hearted people giving the gifts he could no longer give to his own children. Every knock on the door was another reminder that he could not provide. So every year he'd get depressed, go into the hospital and thus avoid the pressure.

In the early 1960s, we were probably the typical poor family, struggling to make do on a small pension and Social Security. We were not unlike a lot of our neighbors. Like a lot of them, we got care packages every Christmas from people we would never see the rest of the year.

One wealthy old friend of my father used to drive up to our small apartment building (which was across from a homeless shelter, where we volunteered for the people my parents considered truly needy), in his Cadillac and drop off a box of apples and a ham. He wore a topcoat, and his wife wore a mink. They patted me on the head, hugged my parents, said kind words and then retreated to a world my parents would never know, leaving a world they never cared to know.

In contrast was the person who every year sent a crisp $50 bill in the mail. For years it came, unmarked, unsigned, unaccompanied by a letter; a symbol of anonymous generosity without strings. I still wonder who they were, and can't help but think well of them; I'm sure the money they gave away helped them think well of themselves.

But most of all I remember the men from church, the ones with the gifts, wrapped in paper with pictures of Wise Men and cards that read: Boy, 9; Girl, 14. We were the generic poor kids, the kids without names, the kids whose faces you see on the news Christmas Day, who make you so happy and warm.

The gifts themselves were odd, funny, sad. I remember only a hideous pair of green knitted slippers with red tassels -- given to me as a teen -- and one of those snow globes, which if I recall correctly, came from the Wisconsin Dells. At age 14, my sister got a plastic Indian doll like ones you see in phony Native American stores. We still laugh uncomfortably at the presents. Or perhaps we laugh uncomfortably at being in a position to receive such odd expressions of charity.

Every year, as I grapple with my own charity, I think of what impact my gifts will have and how the recipients will feel. I think of the strangers who passed through at the holidays, bearing weird gifts. To me they possessed an alluring, mysterious aura; they were the Christmas People, consistent yet ephemeral. They came, they gave, they left. I didn't dislike them, but I didn't cherish them, either. We owed each other nothing. They were simply visitors in my own odd little winter wonderland.

(Copyright 1995 Jon Tevlin)

At the time I first read this essay, I was involved in a reading group about class consciousness, and found this piece challenged a lot of my assumptions. I had never thought about the idea of charity from the point of view of the receiver. Rereading it now, what strikes me is how balanced Tevlin is, in spite of the strong emotions that motivated him to write.

John Scalzi's blog Whatever, which I've belatedly discovered and caught up on via his compilation book Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded, includes several short essays along similar lines: Being Poor, from September 2005, and Shaming the Poor from March 2008. Both of these pieces reminded me of Tevlin's essay, and I had planned to write about them, possibly referring to Tevlin, when lo and behold, today Tevlin was announced as a columnist.

As people who grew up poor, Scalzi and Tevlin share a background that is somewhat unusual among writers in America's land of theoretical plenty. I hope Jon Tevlin will use his new position to write columns that add nuance to the Strib's coverage of regular people's lives.

He's clearly got the gift of words, and I look forward to this new chance for him to share it with all of us.

Obama-Lincoln Cupcakes -- No Thanks

Yesterday, a friend sent me a link to a video of people at the Smithsonian assembling a portrait of Lincoln and Obama using cupcakes iced in a range of colors. This is basically an Impressionist or pointillist image, where each cupcake acts as a pixel creating the overall picture.


Back around the time of the election, I had sent the same friend a link to this earlier Obama portrait done with multiple cupcakes. When I saw the earlier portrait, I was impressed with how clever it was, and I especially liked the nonliteral color palette. In a visual context that began with Shepherd Fairey's Hope poster, it felt genuine and appealing to me.

The new cupcake image from the Smithsonian, however, disturbs me. Because the picture is more realistically rendered both in terms of detail and color scheme, and because of the flag background and (of course) the juxtaposition of Obama with Lincoln, it strikes me as propagandistic: more akin to something you'd see in a museum in North Korea (with the faces of the Beloved Leader and the Dear Leader, of course) than at the Smithsonian.

If it was only Lincoln's face, I wouldn't think much of it, since his place in American hagiography is long settled, and besides, it's his 200th birthday. But to put the face of a sitting president into something like this at the Smithsonian feels antidemocratic to me. And also just plain kitschy.

As anyone who has read my comments on the 2008 election knows, I am an Obama fan... but please, get a grip, people!

Bigfoot Found at Last

Illustrator Graham Roumieu has been drawing cartoons that channel the thoughts of Bigfoot for years, and published several books of Bigfoot's writings. I am behind the times and did not know that Bigfoot had made it into the more-or-less mainstream until I saw Roumieu's book Bigfoot: I Not Dead.

Bigfoot doesn't speak standard English, but instead uses an endearing pidgin that veers between funny and profane, rendered in messy, idiosyncratic hand lettering. As often as not, he is commenting on his life experience as an oddball celebrity in the midst of mass media.

One example shows Bigfoot jumping a chain-link fence while chased by two cops with guns, mace and nightsticks. The text is titled INJUSTICE, and Bigfoot addresses his pursuers in letter form:

Police,
Stop trying arrest Bigfoot for vagrancy. How many times I have explain? I pee over there, over there and over there. Technically make it Bigfoot territory. You see broken stick and piece of fry chicken over there? That kitchen, you standing in foyer. Get out of Bigfoot house if you no have warrant.

One that made me laugh out loud referred to the way Bigfoot is so often seen along roads in remote areas:


The text is called LOOK BOTH WAY:

How many reflective vest Bigfoot have to wear before people stop run Bigfoot over on foggy mountain road at night?! One or two time a year maybe understandable, but one or two time a week? Have vest and blinky light and road flare and everything but still wind up getting cut down like stalk of wheat. Maybe if soccer mom everywhere lay off wine spritzer and stop talk on cell phone while drive Escalade maybe this not happen. Maybe if you not act like my fault maybe I not throw you kids off cliff.

You get the idea from this rant that Bigfoot is not into giving peace a chance. But he knows he isn't perfect, either. In one cartoon he confesses to his addiction to eating garbage:

HAVE PROBLEM

Hello. This a little hard for me talk about. Guess everybody have deep dark secret so maybe should no feel shame. Just come out and say it. Bigfoot addicted to eat garbage. Start out just recreational. Was at party with raccoons and they offer some. Eat and at first feel nothing, then maybe little buzz.

Pretty soon couldn't get enough. Wake up in morning and first thing do is eat garbage. No even matter what kind. Rich people garbage, poor people garbage. Walk around for a week with old mayonnaise jar stuck on hand and just not care.

One day find self living at dump. Bigfoot clean for months now but still day to day. Please help by store your garbage in can with locking lid or put something real heavy on top.

Some of the humor is macabre, but combined with Roumieu's expressively disheveled drawings, it just makes sense as a way to tell the story of a reclusive, misanthropic Yeti who lacks a heart of gold.

DIY Witch

Be sure to click on this one to get an enlarged version so you can see it.

If your newspaper (assuming you still have one and you read it!) doesn't carry Hilary Price's strip "Rhymes with Orange," I feel bad for you.

The good news is you can read the strips a week or so late, in color, on Hilary's newly redesigned site. Or buy one of her books. Support your favorite cartoonists!

L.K. Hanson on Eric Hoffer

I don't know much about Eric Hoffer, but he sounds like quite a contrarian.

On reading this quote, one can't help but think of a famous scene from Monty Python's Life of Brian -- a crowd of people chants "We're all different, we're all individuals." And one lone voice calls out, "I'm not!"

Thanks to L.K. Hanson for another wonderful You Don't Say panel.

Say It, Don't Spray It

A recent BoingBoing item featured a post by neuroscientist-blogger Very Evolved in which V.E. translated a University of Michigan study into accessible language.

The study asked people to read a list of made-up food ingredients, and then rate how dangerous each was on a scale from 1 to 7. The researchers found that ingredients that were hard to pronounce were thought to be more dangerous.

This provoked many comments on Boing Boing about dihydrogen monoxide (i.e., water) as well as this one that I particularly liked: "Water, high-fructose corn syrup, hemlock, arsenic, cyanide, natural flavoring. This sports drink seems safe."

V.E. goes into some detail about how this phenomenon is a product of our evolutionary history (it's basically the same thing as xenophobia, really, which is generally thought to have conferred a survival advantage).

It always amazes me how much food manufacturers don't come up with friendly names for things. I imagine it's because they aren't allowed to. Here are a few of the ingredients listed on a box of Pop Tarts:

• sodium acid pyrophosphate
• niacinamide (don't they know that the ending "ide" means to kill?)
• pyridoxine hydrochloride

And from Campbell's Soup at Hand Chicken with Mini Noodles:

• disodium inosinate
• mixed tocopherols
• disodium guanylate

Of course, a lot of the really scary-sounding ingredients (like pyridoxine hydrochloride) are actually the chemical forms of one of the B vitamins. But I guess if the makers of all these processed foods hadn't removed the vitamins in the first place, they wouldn't have to add them back in, and therefore wouldn't have to list them on the label.

The idea that something that's fake familiar is perceived as safe is a disturbing thing indeed -- although totally obvious to anyone who's paid any attention to marketing and an particularly naming strategy.

Oh, He Did, Did He?

This news flash from the Huffington Post on Sunday, Feb. 8:


You'd think a Time Lord who's always busy saving the world would have enough on going on in his Tardis, without bothering to falsify data.

I guess it must be true, though, because I found this photographic evidence on the web:

Re: Noun, Re: Verb

I've written in the past about the red tape holds up new bridge school of headline writing. Sometimes, though, it's not so much that headlines are inadvertently funny as they are completely unintelligible.

One reason for that unintelligibility is the thoughtless use of words that have more than one part of speech. Usually, it's because they can be either nouns or verbs, as in this fine example from the Pioneer Press on January 19, 2009.

I read this headline three or four times before I understood what it said. As one might logically assume, I thought the first word was a noun and the second one was a verb -- a detainee was releasing something. Then I found the word "show" -- well, that can be a noun. A detainee was releasing a show. Hmm. Then the word "cracks," and I was completely stumped. "Show cracks?", I thought.

Deciding I had gotten it wrong from the start, I returned to the first word, until I finally parsed it: The fact that the government had to release detainees was revealing cracks in the legal cases against the detainees.

This is an extra-fine set of words that can switch-hit as either noun or verb. Releases, show, cracks -- even cases could be a verb, although in this example it's clearly a noun.

Is there a term for these double-agent words? I don't remember ever hearing one, so I thought I would come up with one. Here are my offerings:

• Nerb -- Nice and short, combining noun and verb. Unfortunately, it sounds like some hipsters have already started using the word to combine nerd and noob (as if I was even aware that noob was a word... yes, I really am that out of it).
  
• Syntax evader -- Clever, but a bit vague, and kind of long.
• Ambilogism or maybe ambilog -- Good academic credibility, and bonus points for combining a Latin prefix with a Greek root.
• Starts of peach -- Every list needs at least one Spoonerism.
  

Which one would you vote for? Or do you have any better ideas?

Mary a la Carte--Storytelling Off the Menu

I've never seen any "audience participation" theater before, but I took a chance last night on a one-woman show at Bryant Lake Bowl: "Mary a la Carte."

The premise was that we were all at Mary's Home Cooking diner, and as Mary took orders from members of the audience, each one reminded her of stories from her life. From her spin on the Wheel of Fortune to her days as the Wisconsin Maple Queen, Mary tied everything together as effortlessly as she (along with two guests from the audience) folded napkins into surprising shapes.

At times ribald, at others poignant, the show is a USDA choice example of translating personal writing into a public form. Mary's use of language is natural but sharp, her humor mostly gentle though acutely observed, such as a line that was used to explain her Aunt Martha's alcohol-influenced behavior at a family wedding: "Aunt Martha had been tending bar out of her purse since mid-afternoon."

The show is running on Fridays at 7:00 p.m. through the rest of February. If you haven't been to a show at the Bryant Lake Bowl before, it's good to know that you can order food in the theater (it helps if you arrive a bit before the show time) and drinks throughout.

Be sure to leave room for one Mary's brownies.

Harriet in the Hat

Maybe you've seen some of the Photoshop riffs on Aretha Franklin's inauguration hat, showing it on people in all sorts of photos.

Peter Sieruta over at collectingchildrensbooks.blogspot.com has his own take on Aretha's hat. It's a real joy for those of us who love kids' books.

Sin of Admission

I love the Minnesota Daily (the newspaper of the University of Minnesota Twin Cities), really I do. It's a great campus institution, and it's perpetually judged to be among the best student newspapers in the country. I am very sad that they are turning their Friday edition to web-only, due to lack of advertising.

But my inner grammar cop couldn't help blowing the whistle when my eye fell on this headline (set in something like 48 point type) on the Daily's editorial page today:

"The Daschle blunder: Obama’s admittance sets him on the right path after reneging on his campaign promise."

Admittance? Admittance?

I try to keep my grammar cop happy with a supply of doughnuts (not donuts), but it doesn't always work.

Help Me Out Here, People!

Can you see my problem?

I had a new box of one of my favorites, Celestial Seasonings decaffeinated green tea. Opened it up and was greeted with a whiff of peppermint, which surprised me, but I thought maybe it had been stored next to some peppermint tea. (I went on the Celestial Seasonings tour out in Boulder a few years ago, and that's something they try pretty hard to prevent.) So I made a cup and drank it, but it was so minty I didn't enjoy it at all.

I planned to take the box back to the store for a refund, but forgot about it until the next morning. This time when I took the box out of the cupboard I noticed something I had missed before: A blue stripe at the top of the box, with small white type reversed out of it that said "Mint." See it up there?

When you have the two boxes side by side, you can see that there is a slight difference in the illustration (the red area on the left box contrasts with the blue water on the right box). But the overall gestalt of the two illustrations is the same -- the pagoda is the dominant part of the image, and it's the exactly same. The green used on the rest of each package is the same. It's pretty obvious that these two packages are hard to tell apart, despite the fact that Celestial Seasonings hired a prominent branding firm to redo its highly distinctive packaging.

Another company whose products I use probably can't afford to hire an expensive branding firm, and their packaging has the same problem as Celestial Seasonings. Locally owned Parkers peanut butter is stored in the refrigerated case, and it has several varieties to differentiate.

I like creamy peanut butter, and my other half likes crunchy, so we have both in our refrigerator. We have to store them in different locations in the fridge because if we don't, it's all too easy to chow down on the wrong one. It's pretty shocking to take a bite of peanut butter toast and get a mouthful of crunchy peanuts you weren't expecting.


Did you ever notice how similar the words "creamy" and "crunchy" are? There's hardly anything to differentiate the word shapes, and the lettering style used here doesn't help (it's practically unreadable, with its white outline and drop shadow).

The green vs. blue swoosh is pretty low in contrast as well.


It's no better when viewed from the side. Identical set-up of the bowl, peanut butter and spoon, same yellow behind the logo. Only the green vs. blue swoosh and the hard-to-read words to differentiate the two visually.

Well, enough crabbiness for one day, especially about something that's essentially trivial.

Phonebooks No More

Did you hear the good news? Here in the Twin Cities, we' re free of the mandatory phonebook delivery! (I'm not sure how widespread this new policy is.)

According to the Star Tribune, a state study last February estimated that 85 percent of phone books in Minnesota are thrown in the trash, rather than recycled or reused. And that's assuming they even needed to be produced in the first place, since quite a number of people (like me) have zero use for them anymore.

To opt out of the phonebook delivery extravaganza:

• Dex: Go to wwwdexknows.com or call 877-2-GET-DEX (ironic to call a number like that to say you don't want to get Dex).
• Yellowbook: Call 800-YB-YELLO (good question).
• Verizon Yellow Pages: Call 800-888-8448.

(In case you didn't know, that's an albatross perched on the phonebook stack.)

Imagination Runs Wild in Dreams

I saw this music video of an Oren Lavie song recently and was impressed with the vision and thinking that went into it. (Understatement, but I'm kind of tired!)

A Reminder from Henry Petroski

In the early '90s, I attended a design conference that had Chip Kidd as a speaker. At the time, he was a rising star, creating book covers for Alfred A. Knopf. He described his experience designing the cover for Henry Petroski's book The Pencil, which was new at the time and on the bestseller list.

As he told it, it was the classic graphic designer's nightmare -- when shown the design, Petroski said, "I used to do some typesetting and I have some suggestions..." I remember the audience groaning in empathy at these words, which was Kidd's intention. All designers have had clients who think they're the designer, sometimes giving instructions down to partial points of type size or placement.

But I thought, Geez, this is Henry Petroski! He's built his reputation on understanding how things work. He really might have something useful to say.

I thought of that moment when reading Petroski's op-ed in Friday's Pioneer Press, reprinted from the Washington Post, titled "Science Is Never Enough. Bring on the Engineers." In it, Petroski reminds us of the difference between science and engineering, and that while science is necessary in many ways, it's engineering that will make the dream of an economy based on green jobs a reality.

As Petroski wrote, "Science seeks to understand the world as it is; only engineering can change it." Thanks for the reminder, Henry.