Brown Bat, Brown Bat, Where Did You Go?

A few weeks ago, I heard an incredible NPR story about the impending extinction of the common brown bat.

In just a few years, the entire population has become threatened by a fungal disease called white nose syndrome, which interferes with their sensitive hearing and radar, as well as their wings.

Discovered near Albany, New York, in 2006, by 2008 it had spread to Connecticut, Vermont and Massachusetts, according to the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources. By 2009 it was in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Experts fear that the species will be wiped out within 10 years. No one knows exactly what the effect of that loss would be on everything else in the ecosystem, but think about this aspect as highlighted in the NPR transcript:

MANN: What that will mean to the environment is still a complete mystery. But, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has estimated that losing bats could cost farmers a billion dollars a year. People think of bats as pests, but Brock Fenton says the truth is exactly the opposite.

Dr. FENTON: So, each of these bats is eating half its body weight in insects every night. And if it's a pregnant female, or a lactating female, she's eating her own body weight in insects every night. So, that's a hell of a lot of insects.

And that's not to mention bats' important role as pollinators and distributors of seeds.

Some researchers are working on the problem, of course, but in these economic times there's not much money.

And imagine the politics of telling the bat-phobic public that you want to spend more of their tax dollars investigating why all the bats are dying.

________

More from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Northeast Region website

List of cave closures in the Northeast

World Reserve Monetary Exchange Exploits Ted Kennedy

Well, if it's not another expensive, opportunistically timed coin collection from the World Reserve Monetary Exchange.

It's the day after Ted Kennedy's funeral, and we've got a full-page, color ad in the Star Tribune promoting "free" Kennedy half dollars.


(Click on the ad to see it larger.)

How does it work, and what's the free part?

World Reserve offers a "vault tube" of 20 never-circulated, half-dollar coins (face value $10) plus a special Ted Kennedy portrait coin for free, for a total of $10.50 in face value. These two items (the vault tube and the free coin) cost $28 plus shipping. So that's $17.50 over the face value (167%).

A second offer in the ad -- and one that is vastly more emphasized in the ad's visuals -- is a "treasure chest" containing three vault tubes (60 coins) and three "free" portrait coins, one each of Ted, Bobby and John.


The coins in these vault tubes have been plated in silver, gold and platinum. This set can be had for "3 payments of $96 and shipping." (Not clear from that language whether the set costs $96 total or $96 times 3 payments, or $288.)

So that means the 63 coins, with a face value of $31.50, will cost you either $96 or $288, depending on what the vague pricing language means. That's either 205% or 814% over the face value.

What is the full price?

I just had to know for sure, so I called to find out what the price really is. The guy I talked to was clearly working from a script, because he used words like "awarded" (congratulating me that I had called in time to be "awarded" the coins) and misspoke when he referred to Ted Kennedy as the "Lion of the State" instead of the Lion of the Senate. I did find out that the coins were minted in 2009.

And what is the price for the treasure chest? You guessed it. It's three payments of $96, or $288 -- a whopping 814% over the face value of the coins ($4.57 per coin). My customer service rep did let me know that the shipping on that offer is free, though. Hey, thanks!

When I demurred and said I couldn't decide right away because I had to talk to someone else about it, and that I would call back, he read me the part of the script designed to pressure me into making a decision on the spot. "I would hate to see you miss out," he said. The coins are available "first come, first served." He offered to put me on hold while I discussed it with whoever I needed to. But I said no, thanks, I would have to call back, and hung up.

What are the coins worth?

Maybe these plated coins are actually worth more than their face value, which would account for their price. It seemed possible to me, a layperson when it comes to coin collecting.

However, it appears this is not the case. WikiAnswers says there is "some small after-market for them but they have no additional numismatic value because they are technically classed as altered coins." This is confirmed on the Heritage Auctions site, which says, "Gold plated coins are not mint made. Most of the gold plated coins are common date coins. Unfortunately gold plated coins have no numismatic value."

Even if the plated coins had at least their face value to start, and increased in value by 500% (the amount of increase seen for uncirculated Eisenhower dollars, a statistic dangled by the writers of the ad to make readers think their coins will appreciate in a similar way), anyone who purchased the plated coins would still be 314% short of what they paid to the World Reserve.

Update: In a cease and desist letter I received from an attorney on behalf of the World Reserve, I was told: "Each 2009 issued Kennedy half-dollar in uncirculated condition has a current collector value of $2.00" (according to the Guide Book of United States Coins), and is being sold by the United States Mint on its website in a plain paper wrapper of 20 coins for approximately 83 cents per coin plus shipping (two rolls of 20 coins, selling for $32.95 + $4.95 shipping).

So the coins appear to have a current value of either $2.00 apiece or 83 cents apiece, depending on which of these pricing sources you rely on. This assumes that the coins' alteration by plating has not affected their value negatively.

Also note that the 20 plain, unaltered 2009 Kennedy half dollars in a vault tube offered by World Reserve for $28.00 plus shipping can be purchased directly from the U.S. Mint in a paper wrapper for $16.25 plus shipping. The only difference is the plastic tube vs. the paper wrapper.

Puffery and blather in the ad copy

As always, the ad is presented as if it were a regular page in the newspaper, including a dateline at the beginning, noted as (UMS). UMS stands for the Universal Media Syndicate, the ad agency that shares a parent company with the World Reserve.

The ad's copy is full of puffery terms. The Kennedy half dollars "have been lavishly covered" in gold, silver and platinum. In reality, it's likely to be a microthin amount of the material, since that's what plating is.

The coins come packaged in "specially sealed crystal clear vault tubes"...better known as plastic, which I think we all know is generally transparent. The word "crystal," however, is being used to associate common plastic with a much more valuable and desirable material.

One paragraph quotes someone named Robert Anthony, director of the World Reserve: "The never-circulated U.S. Gov't minted Kennedy half dollars are one of the highest denomination coins ever produced by the U.S. Mint." Which means exactly nothing. The U.S. Mint makes coins in different amounts, including dollar coins. They make half dollar coins, too. So what?

Another paragraph has Anthony raving about the treasure chest with its coins "lavishly gilded in gold, silver and platinum." He goes on to say "You just won't believe the expression on people's faces when you hand them these. It's like you just gave them a Million Dollars." Odd use of capitalization there -- its clearly intended to make the words "million dollars" jump out of the copy.

Plus $3 to the Granted Wish Foundation!

At the end of the ad copy, Robert Anthony is once again quoted:

And, in the tradition of John, Bobby and Ted's dedication to helping others, The World Reserve is contributing three dollars to the Granted Wish Foundation for each caller who calls and beats the order deadline.

In a previous post, I found that the Granted Wish Foundation is part of the same network of companies as the World Reserve, all associated with Arthur Middle Capitol Holdings, a marketing conglomerate started by one Rodney Napier. The Foundation's mission is to "provide wish fulfillment to disabled, disadvantaged and deserving individuals and families."

Since I'm not located in Ohio, I can't fully comment on the Granted Wish Foundation's effect in their local community. However, I can say it instantly creates several blips on my fraud radar.

First, there is a serious vacuum of discussion about the work of this foundation. Googling the organization's name returns links to pages from the Foundation's own website, podcasts or YouTube channel, a bunch of mentions of Cleveland Browns quarterback Brady Quinn making an appearance on behalf of the Foundation, and a few media articles about its executive director.

What's lacking is discussion about any work they've done (except on the testimonials page of their own site). Wouldn't you think their name would turn up repeatedly somewhere on the Web if they were doing good work for people? Update: There is one story from the Roanoke (Virginia) Times about the Foundation purchasing a $600 tricycle for a young man with cerebral palsy.

Second, they don't publish an annual report on their website, nor do they provide a breakdown of their expenses to show what percent is spent on administration and fundraising vs. program.

Third, Rodney Napier, head of Arthur Middleton Capital Holdings, is listed as one of two board members for the foundation on the About magazine site; I'm not sure if this is the full extent of their board or not, since there is no board list on the Foundation's own site. I'd love to see a copy of their IRS 990 form (also not available on their website), which is another place where financials are disclosed and conflicts of interest are monitored.

Looking at board lists, 990s and financial statements is key to assessing a nonprofit's worthiness, according to the Charities Review Council. This information "should be found on the nonprofit's web site, preferably in one place so that the same content can be reliably printed and mailed upon request." (See the CRC's accountability standards here.)

In honor of Ted Kennedy?

In my opinion, it's an odd way to honor the memory of Ted Kennedy: by making a $3 donation to a foundation with no clear track record from payments made for products that aren't worth nearly as much as the asking price.

But the World Reserve doesn't really honor Kennedy's memory, of course; they just see his death as a marketing opportunity.

________________

Other resources on the World Reserve Monetary Exchange:

• One coin-collecting blogger did a great job of exploding the lies and half-truths in one of World Reserve's earlier presidential coin ads.
• Another has written about the World Reserve's pricing in general.
• I've written numerous times about the ads of the World Reserve, its sister companies and parent company, including the Universal Health Card.

Bad Stories Come in Threes

Warning: This is going to be a post you may not want to read. A post the folks over at BoingBoing might say requires a "unicorn chaser" (a soothing, positive image they post to get a negative story out of everyone's heads).

It was the third story that finally compelled me to write this. Friday's Pioneer Press -- which arrived soaking wet and so therefore didn't get read until evening after it had a chance to dry out -- put it at the top of the Local section: "Cops: Dad hit son over shirt color."

The story, by Mara Gottfried, relayed how a 30-year-old man beat his 4-year-old son because he was wearing a blue shirt.

Why? Because Dad is part of the Bloods gang, and blue is a rival gang's color. This man is 30 years old. 30.

The second story, from this past week. A 20-year-old woman flees the scene of an illegal street race around midnight in the Midway neighborhood. She roars down the side streets, around corners and finally runs the red light at University Avenue going at least 60 mph, instantly killing a man named Moussa Ould Maayif, who was on his way home from an evening gathering where he had broken his Ramadan fast.

The woman, Jacqueline Wagner, "turned south in the northbound lane of Vandalia Street — passing traffic again. She then drove into the intersection of Vandalia and University at full speed, running the red light, and hit Maayif's eastbound vehicle on the [driver's] side..."

For those not from the Twin Cities, University Avenue is a major thoroughfare connecting Minneapolis and St. Paul. It's four lanes wide, plus parking -- a busy street at any time. The idea of a person running a red light across University at 60 miles an hour is insane.

The first story, from back in July, also in the Pioneer Press (though no longer available on their site): A 21-year-old woman named Angel Marie Rawls (with a female friend) prank called her grandmother because they were "bored" and "wanted to have some fun." They threatened grandma with phrases like "I'm gonna kill you," "You're going to die" and "I'm watching you." The PiPress story says:

Just after midnight on Feb. 5, police responded to the home of a 69-year-old Forest Lake woman and her 81-year-old husband on a report of a possible prowler. Dispatchers also told police the woman had been receiving harassing phone calls.

While officers were at the home, the phone rang more than 20 times. The officers answered some of the calls, which came from a restricted number, and heard a female caller threaten to kill the woman, addressing her by her first name.

When one officer identified himself as police, the caller refused to give her name but said she was calling because she wanted the woman and man to get help.

The officers told the woman to turn her phone off, but she contacted them again at 9:30 p.m. to say more calls had come in.

In all, the pranksters called Rawls' grandmother more than 45 times on Feb. 5, according to phone records subpoenaed by police.

Johnson [the friend] told police she knew it was illegal to make the calls but wasn't thinking when they did it.

These three stories are not related, but they all involve people who acted without thought, and more than that, in a way that is incomprehensible.

It's odd to say, but I actually hope they were all drinking or taking some type of drug at the time, because that would at least begin to explain their complete lack of judgment and inability to acknowledge that there are other people in the world outside themselves.

(Thanks for listening.)

Heavy Table Goes to the Fair

Ah, the Minnesota State Fair. I was feeling a bit indifferent this year, until I read James Norton's 2009 food tour on The Heavy Table. (And I also heard that someone made Obama's birth certificate out of seeds in the crop art contest. That alone is worth the price of admission.)

The best new (to me) foods and drinks from Norton's story:

• $1 frozen cider in the Ag building
• Stanly’s Sugarbush Maple soda in the Eco Experience building (I love anything maple!)
• A tip to add Tabasco to the ranch dressing before putting it on my usual helping of fried green tomatoes.

And this about one of Giggles' Campfire Grill's recent offerings:

The salmon on a stick ($5.25) at Giggles’ Campfire Grill is one of the food finds of the fair, hands down. It’s a generous portion, and the sweet / hot tang of the raspberry chipotle and Walla Walla onions is spot on. Also comes with a couple cream cheese-smeared crackers, as if you needed more of an excuse to eat Atlantic salmon with a great topper.

The story is complete with a Google map to show you exactly where each food can be found. And Heavy Table promises to add more Fair coverage, as well as a Twitter feed and more photos on Flickr. I guess it really is the age of social media.

And if you're wondering what's shown in the photo at top, that's Summit Beer on a Stick -- three samplings from St. Paul's Summit Brewery, embedded in a paddle. Available in the newly rebuilt Bazaar building, where you can also hear live music. (The Bazaar is also home to Island Noodles, which I had at the Living Green Expo last May and really liked.... 21 vegetables and soba noodles, wok fried on the spot.)

Guess I'll be going to the Fair after all!

Quoting Adlai Stevenson

As a person born in the very late 1950s, I am the wrong age to know anything much about Adlai Stevenson, who ran for president twice just before I was born and died when I was not yet 6 years old.

But every time I stumble across a quote from Stevenson, I'm enthralled. I recently saw this one in a newsletter:

"Some people approach every problem with an open mouth."

It got me wondering about who this man was, and what else he had to say.

One thing I didn't know about Stevenson was that before he was a lawyer and a politician, he was a journalist. From reading his early biography, it's clear his first love was words.

Here are a few more great Adlaisms.

"Change is inevitable. Change for the better is a full-time job."

"I'm not an old, experienced hand at politics. But I am now seasoned enough to have learned that the hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving that you are unworthy of winning."

"Journalists do not live by words alone, although sometimes they have to eat them."

After an anti-United Nations demonstrator hit Stevenson in the head with her sign, and a man spat on him, Stevenson was quoted as saying "I don't want to send them to jail. I want to send them to school."

When a campaign supporter said he was sure Stevenson would "get the vote of every thinking man," Stevenson replied, "Thank you, but I need a majority to win."

"The tragedy of our day is the climate of fear in which we live, and fear breeds repression. Too often sinister threats to the Bill of Rights, to the freedom of the mind, are concealed under the patriotic cloak of anti-communism." [Updatable to anti-terrorism, as pointed out on the television show Boston Legal.]

"Patriotism is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime."

"Public confidence in the integrity of the government is indispensable to faith in democracy; and when we lose faith in the system, we have lost faith in everything we fight and spend for."

"The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal -- that you can gather votes like box tops -- is, I think, the ultimate indignity to the democratic process."

"We have confused the free with the free and easy."

A Book 24 Years Ahead of Its Time

Any Mad Men fans out there? Did anyone else notice the Compact Oxford English Dictionary prominently featured on the credenza of the new character, British overloard Lane Pryce?

I did. Seeing it had three volumes, I assumed it was older and more British than the two-volume Book of the Month club version I bought as a teenager (shown at right).

But no! The Visual Thesaurus reports that the three-volume set is an utter anachronism -- there was no compact edition until 1971 (the one I have, I assume), and the three volume set is from 1987!

(Via the wonderful Twitter phenomenon thatwhichmatter -- tweeting a half-dozen times a day on the finer points of grammar.)

T.R. Reid Takes a World View of Health Care

Sunday's Washington Post carried an excellent look at health insurance systems around the world by foreign correspondent T.R. Reid. In "Five Myths about Health Care Around the World," Reid shares both his experience (as a person who has lived in a lot of countries) and his analysis.

The five myths are:

1. It's all socialized medicine out there.
2. Overseas, care is rationed through limited choices or long lines.
3. Foreign health-care systems are inefficient, bloated bureaucracies.
4. Cost controls stifle innovation.
5. Health insurance has to be cruel.

Some of Reid's best lines:

The world champion at controlling medical costs is Japan, even though its aging population is a profligate consumer of medical care. On average, the Japanese go to the doctor 15 times a year, three times the U.S. rate. They have twice as many MRI scans and X-rays. Quality is high; life expectancy and recovery rates for major diseases are better than in the United States. And yet Japan spends about $3,400 per person annually on health care; the United States spends more than $7,000.

And it's clear from another part of Reid's story that some of that savings comes from MRIs, which cost $98 apiece in Japan (vs. $1,500 apiece in the U.S., and it's not because the cost is regulated in Japan).

In many ways, foreign health-care models are not really "foreign" to America, because our crazy-quilt health-care system uses elements of all of them. For Native Americans or veterans, we're Britain: The government provides health care, funding it through general taxes, and patients get no bills. For people who get insurance through their jobs, we're Germany: Premiums are split between workers and employers, and private insurance plans pay private doctors and hospitals. For people over 65, we're Canada: Everyone pays premiums for an insurance plan run by the government, and the public plan pays private doctors and hospitals according to a set fee schedule. And for the tens of millions without insurance coverage, we're Burundi or Burma: In the world's poor nations, sick people pay out of pocket for medical care; those who can't pay stay sick or die.

This fragmentation is another reason that we spend more than anybody else and still leave millions without coverage. All the other developed countries have settled on one model for health-care delivery and finance; we've blended them all into a costly, confusing bureaucratic mess.

You'd think all the people who get upset about waste in government or corporations would be up in arms about the waste created by our multiple, overlapping, inefficient systems.

In terms of results, almost all advanced countries have better national health statistics than the United States does. In terms of finance, we force 700,000 Americans into bankruptcy each year because of medical bills. In France, the number of medical bankruptcies is zero. Britain: zero. Japan: zero. Germany: zero.

That last paragraph said it all about the brokenness of the American way of doing health care.

T.R. Reid has a forthcoming book to watch for, called The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care. He also produced a Frontline documentary for PBS in 2008 called Sick Around the World. (watch it here).

Guns, Yes; Sign Poles, No

A letter to the editor from Sunday's Pioneer Press:

Memories of the RNC

The recent news that an American citizen showed up outside an appearance by President Barack Obama with both a rifle and pistol brings back memories of the Republican convention last September [in St. Paul].

My wife and I showed up for the poor people's march with signs that had small aluminum handles. We were promptly surrounded by police and photographers. The police made me remove the handles, remnants of a salvaged lawn chair, as a threat to the peace and good order of St. Paul.

The Pioneer Press printed a picture of that law enforcement action, which ensured that I would never use my "Impeach Bush" sign as a weapon.

It's now apparent that I should have used an AR-15 as the handle for my sign. Or is the real policy to hassle progressive Americans but allow right-wing fruitcakes to intimidate anyone who disagrees with their Big foot, tooth fairy, wicked witch, black helicopter, jack-booted thug, pull-the-plug-on-Grandma delusions?

Bob Tammen, Soudan

Actually, the last paragraph sounds a bit hyperbolic, but Bob's main point is well-taken. It's a pretty darn strange double standard.

Ikea Goes All Verdana

Like millions (billions?) of others, I get the Ikea catalog in the mail; their most recent one just arrived. Its design has been visually stable for a long time, in part because it has consistently used the Futura typeface throughout.

Suddenly, the company has decided to standardize all of its font usage worldwide on something other than Futura, marking a noticeable change in the catalog's appearance.


(Futura-based design on the left; new design on the right.)

This could be a legitimate decision -- for instance, they might think Futura is not differentiated enough, since it has been around for over 80 years, and is used by many other companies. Perhaps they want to make a more clear "brand statement."

But no, that's obviously not the reason, because what font did they choose?

Verdana.

Now, don't get me wrong -- I like Verdana as a text face for screen use. It's far superior to the other sans serifs choices that are generally available.

But it's plain old ugly for display use, and I wouldn't even consider using it for print. Its letter shapes are specifically tuned to be readable at smaller sizes, so when it's used at larger sizes as in the catalog, it's unattractive. It looks big, oversized, uncomfortable. Note how in the sample below, it appears larger than Futura, even though both are set at the same point size.


WhenVerdana is used as text type, particularly on a screen where resolution is always in question, that bigger size is an advantage, but in print it's what designers call "horsey."

Aside from its size, the letter shapes themselves are sometimes awkward. I particularly dislike the Verdana numbers... and there are a lot of numbers used at large sizes in the Ikea catalog.

While my aversion to the font's design is clearly a matter of taste, what can't be disputed is that Verdana has zero brand resonance for Ikea -- in part because they've switched away from a font that did have brand resonance, which the chain had built up over the years, and in part because Verdana is already in use everywhere online, so it can't possibly signify Ikea.

The folks over at typophile.com have been discussing Ikea's font change, pointing out that the company's founder is cheap, which probably motivated the switch as Ikea moves into more markets that require better language support from its corporate fonts. Verdana already has extensive multi-lingual support, and it's available on all the computers throughout the company at no additional cost.

Designer James Puckett questioned the financial common sense of that decision, however:

I would argue that making such a dramatic change to the visual identity of such a valuable brand has potential costs that are much higher than the cost of extending Futura to cover more languages. If Ikea has to do one big ad campaign in the US and Europe to reinforce the new identity, they might spend more than they would have to extend Futura.

St. Thomas art history professor Craig Eliason pointed out that the switch might be partly intended to sync up with "web-immersed" young audiences, who "might feel subliminally quite at home in a store filled with Verdana." But this doesn't address the fact that there is no differentiation to be had from Verdana -- young consumers might feel at home, but they could be anywhere with their homey feeling, not specifically at Ikea.

Will the change have any effect on Ikea's sales? Simon Daniels of Microsoft's Typography Group wondered about that, saying, "I’ll be interested to see if their downward sales spiral is ever associated with the font change, and they change back, or change up. A grand experiment, to be sure."

Hmm. Maybe Daniels is right -- it's a great chance to see if something like a font change has any real-world (financial) effect, or if it's just something a bunch of nattering designers get bent out of shape about.

On second thought, maybe I should be glad Ikea made the switch!

Update: There are some really great before and after images of the Ikea catalog on idsgn.org.

Living with the Chicken Heart Every Day

As a kid, my family enjoyed Bill Cosby's album Wonderfulness, especially the bit called "The Chicken Heart." (Listen to an MP3 of Cosby's original recording here.)

I think of it often these days, whenever I hear about people who listen to alarmist 24-hour news stations or inflammatory talk radio, and who subsequently think child abductors lurk around every corner, Obama is coming for their guns, or health insurance reform is a government takeover.

In the story, Cosby is 7 years old. His parents go out and leave him alone, warning him not to get out of his bed, because on previous date nights he had turned on the radio and listened to a scary radio show.

His mother reminds him that because it frightened him so much, he "smeared jello all over the kitchen floor to make the monster slip if he came at you." And that when his father later came in to get a drink of water, he slipped and hurt himself.

(If you're wondering why his parents would leave a 7-year-old alone, Cosby reminds us: "This was before babysitters when parents did not believe in babysitters at all. The philosophy was, 'What? Let some stranger look after my kid? I'd just as soon leave him home by himself.' ")

After his parents leave, of course, Cosby immediately turns on the Philco radio to the Lights Out program and hears a story called "The Chicken Heart that Ate Up New York City."

Punctuated with Cosby's explosive, imitation heartbeats (ba-BUM, ba-BUM, ba-BUM over and over again into the microphone), the story tells of a chicken's heart that spills in a New Jersey laboratory and grows 6 feet tall, then goes out "in search of human blood."

After eating the elevator boy, all the cabs, the Empire State Building and the Jersey Turnpike, Cosby rhythmically intones, "It's in your home state -- ba-BUM, ba-BUM, ba-BUM -- It's in your home town -- ba-BUM, ba-BUM, ba-BUM -- It's outside of your door -- ba-BUM, ba-BUM, ba-BUM -- And it's going to eat YOU up."

At which point the 7-year-old Cosby gets out the jello and smears it all over the kitchen floor. Then he sets the sofa on fire. Meanwhile the rhythmic ba-BUM, ba-BUM, ba-BUM from the radio continues.

The story concludes:

My father came in the house, said, "What --" ZOOP! (falls on the kitchen floor.) "What the hell's the sofa doing on fire??!"

Cosby: Come in the house, the Chicken Heart's going to eat you up!

Father: What Chicken Heart are you talking about?

Cosby: The one on the radio!

Father: So you idiot, turn it off!

(Dead silence for a few seconds as the traumatic ba-BUMs disappear.)

Cosby then says: "I hadn't thought of that."

It's time we all think to turn off the bad news, brought to us by companies that profit from selling us negativity, as well as ideologues who benefit from fanning our fears.

We don't have to listen to it, and we'd all be happier and better able to discuss the important issues of the day without it.

Holy Mustangs, Batman!

Am I the only one who finds this funny?



All I can think is...



Apologies to Immaculate High School and its sports teams.

Mourning Becomes Electric

Interesting post on kottke.org.

Basically, Jason K. wonders what will happen as our media-saturated society creates more and more micro-celebrities. Of course, those of us who watch or read a lot of popular culture media will all feel as though we know these celebrities. Then, as time goes along, the celebrities will die, and it will be as though people we know are dying -- constantly.

Kottke wondered, "Will the NY Times national obituary section swell to 30 pages a day?"

This reminds me of the "Scary World" effect of media -- the more we watch television, the more we think the world is scarier and more dangerous than it actually is. And that's because humans are wired to deal with only a small number of people in our lifetimes, to really know at most 50 or 100 people, to only care about those 50 to 100 people.

Yet when we hear about child abductions or murders from all over the country or even the world (whether fiction or fact), brought to us via media that moves and emotes, we feel as though we know those children, those murdered people, and by extension, we feel as if we or our children are in danger.

Following a similar logic, Kottke points out that we'll feel the same when all our "close personal friends" who are celebrities die. This has been happening for a long time, of course (Princess Diana, Michael Jackson, and so on), but it's accelerating because the number of 15-minute-famous people is growing in our 24-hour-news world.

More Accurately Named "Life Panels"

For anyone who thinks health care reform involves "death panels," check out this AP article (I saw it in today's Star Tribune).

The entirety of what follows is a quote. I've shortened the article a bit (but you can read it all on the Strib site). I've added emphasis in a few spots.
__________

As a political uproar rages over end-of-life counseling, a new study finds offering such care to dying cancer patients improves their mood and quality of life.

The study of 322 patients in rural New Hampshire and Vermont also suggests the counseling didn't discourage people from going to the hospital. The research didn't look at costs.

The study's publication in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association coincides with the fight over health care overhaul proposals in Congress.

Some conservatives have called end-of-life counseling included in one version of the bill "death panels" and a step toward euthanasia. A House proposal allows Medicare to pay doctors to chat with patients, if they desire it, about living wills, hospice and appointing a trusted person to make decisions when the patient is incapacitated....

In the new study, trained nurses did the end-of-life counseling, mostly by phone, with patients and family caregivers using a model based on national guidelines.

All the patients in the study had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Half were assigned to receive usual care. The other half received usual care plus counseling about managing symptoms, communicating with health care providers and finding hospice care.

Patients and their caregivers also could attend monthly 90-minute group meetings with a doctor and a nurse to ask questions and discuss problems in what's called a "shared medical appointment."

Patients who got the counseling scored higher on quality of life and mood measures than patients who did not.

The patients who got the counseling also lived longer, by more than five months on average, but that finding didn't reach a statistical level of significance....

In both groups, hospital stays were rare: six to seven days on average during the patients' last year of life. Betty Ferrell of City of Hope Medical Center in Duarte, Calif., who has done similar research but wasn't involved in the new study, said that's not surprising.

"It's patients and families in their own living rooms who are dealing with end-of-life care," Ferrell said. "They're not in the hospital. They're at home."

Ferrell, who leads a guidelines panel on end-of-life care, praised the study, which was funded by the National Cancer Institute, and said she hoped it would clear up misconceptions.

"This is about helping people live with the diagnosis the doctor has given," Ferrell said. "This study reflects on what kind of support do people deserve when they're dying."
___________

Thanks to the National Cancer Institute for funding the research... a great use of our tax dollars!

Love to Hate Papyrus

Some while ago, a friend sent me a link to this comic from xkcd:



xkcd is created by a geek named Randall Munroe, and it's very popular with the the boingboing cohort, among others... according to the Wikipedia, it gets 60 to 70 million views per month. (So I guess the odds are you already know about it.)


In case you don't already know what it looks like, here's a sample of Papyrus, much reviled among typefaces. There's even a blog called ihatepapyrus. Seriously.

The thing that bugs me the most about Papyrus is how light and wimpy it is. It has no graphic weight. I think its designer intended it to be used at large sizes, but it usually isn't.

It's one of those fonts that appeals to novices (like Comic Sans or Sand, or many, many others that shall remain namless). When you see Papyrus in a design, there's a 99.8% chance a designer was not involved.

A post from another blog, jesse.blisten.net, put it this way: "It’s that font that every small business thinks communicates exactly what their business is all about."

Flips of the Tongue = Conflations

Readers who are familiar with my past posts about flips of the tongue won't be surprised to hear me laughing at my most recent discovery on the web: conflations.com. (Thanks to a Tweet by thatwhichmatter.

The site compiles examples where two idioms have been smashed together, with the express purpose of encouraging people to use the conflated expressions.

Rather than seeing these head-on-collisions as a problem, conflations.com believes that "Idiom conflation is a poetic art with a purpose. It is possible to dramatically re-contextualize words, or to simply combine commonplace expressions in a completely perfunctory manner."

The conflations are broken into two lists, based on whether the two root idioms originally had the same meaning or not (labeled congruent and incongruent). The lists are long, and you can submit your own, or try to come up with new ones.

Here are a few of my favorites.

Congruent:

Know-it-pants
Screwed me under the bus
You hit the nose on the head
Like shooting cake in the park
Nobody's human
That tastes like my alley
When in Rome, join 'em.
Que sera la vie
Every dog has his fifteen minutes

Incongruent:

Throw your towel into the ring
Under the dumps
Shoot yourself to spite your face
Steam your wild oats
Preaching to a dead horse
The devil's in the pudding
Don't judge a sheep by its clothing
I have too many eggs on my plate

Don't laugh too hard. I personally vow to begin using "know-it-pants" and "that tastes like my alley" as often as possible.

FAST Signs in Sparta, Wisconsin

Have you ever wondered where all the large fiberglass figures come from that populate the amusement parks, theme restaurants and children's pools? The kinds of animals and other beings that inhabit places like M. Schettl Freight Sales?

The poorly kept secret: FAST Signs, located in Sparta, Wisconsin (a few miles east of La Crosse).

At FAST, you won't see a lot of finished figures, because the idea is to get them painted and move them to their permanent homes.


But there are a few samples out in the yard, such as this odd lion, getting his elbow licked by a giant frog.

What you do get to see at FAST are the molds that are used to create the figures; they're all stored outside. The largest one we saw was a dinosaur so large that it was stored in pieces -- one leg was about 7 feet tall.


Other residents of the yard ranged from a horse's head growing out of the ground...


...to a family of cows...


...to a tilting buffalo...


...to Big Boy (at FAST, he's always out standing in his field!).


I loved the inside of this ice cream cone top.


FAST stands for Fiberglass Animals, Shapes & Trademarks, like the sign mold says. Worth a trip, and not too far from I-90!

Rest and Rela in Wisconsin

I've been hanging out in western Wisconsin this weekend, and came across this fine example of sign degeneration:


I think that last word is supposed to be RE-GENERATE, but I can't be sure.

Just down the road from the the Re St Rela sign is this all-purpose Wisconsin retail business:


That's quite a combination. If you were wondering, there actually is a full-service bar inside that barn, plus a coffee bar, a bunch of cheese, and a whole floor of antiques.


Here's one fun package from the Loft antique store.


And another package. Check out the "scientifically processed" potato claim. Somehow, I don't find that reassuring. (From the Loft antique store.)


A 1966 cover of the National Review. This would have been when Reagan was running for his first term as governor of California. Nice illustration! (From the Loft antique store.)


Wow, those are some creepy children! (From the Loft antique store.)


I also got a chance to check out a small-town library book sale. While perusing the tables, I came across this cover, and confess I misread the title as Cholera: The Key to Health, Vitality and Longevity. Which, of course, made absolutely no sense! So after a double take, I realized it actually said Chlorella (a kind of algae). Yet another example of why Linnaeus is not always the best source for brand names.


And finally, down the road, I saw this ultimate example of generic labeling. Yum! It makes me hungry just looking at it.

Grandma's Dictionary

My mother recently received copies of some of her mother's writing.

Most of it is fiction, written in long hand, and I plan to type it up to share with the family (barring the occasional unreadable word), but a few pieces were typed, and one was the beginning of a family dictionary.

I thought it was pretty amusing, and I hope we find the rest of it some day! But in the meantime, here are letters A through D.

A

Adult: A person who has stopped growing at both ends and started growing in the middle.

Advice: One thing that is more blessed to give than receive.

Alas: Early Victorian for Oh, Hell!

B

Babies: Little rivets in the bonds of matrimony.

Bargain sale: An event at which a woman ruins one dress while she buys another.

Bostonian: An American, broadly speaking.

Bridge: A card game in which a good deal depends upon a good deal.

Budget: A plan for worrying before you spend instead of afterward.

C

Christian fortitude: Being able to bear the sufferings of other folks with great resignation.

Conceit: The rooster that thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.

Congressman: A man who votes for all appropriations and against all taxes.

Conservative: A man who is too cowardly to fight and too fat to run.

Contented man: A man who enjoys the scenery along the detour.

Convinced talker: A man who can explain to his high-school-aged son wherein algebra is going to be any use to him after he's out of school.

Coward: One who, in a perilous emergency, thinks with his feet.

Cynic: One who says, "You can't believe everything you hear, but you can repeat it.

D

Darling: The popular form of address used in speaking to a person of the opposite sex whose name you cannot at the moment recall.

Debt: The only thing that doesn't grow smaller when it's contracted.

Desire: There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it.

I don't know if my grandmother wrote these words, or gathered them from sayings in the family, or a mixture of both. I don't even know if they are original to the family, or if they were common folk aphorisms. But there are some real zingers in there!

Don't Let the Facts Interfere with Your Press Release

Wednesday's Star Tribune included a well-written, thorough story by Kevin Duchschere, titled "Not Always Sober, but Safe."

Basically, Duchschere took what was intended to be a politician's clever press release, belittling a nonprofit program the politician thinks is a waste of taxpayers' money, and looked into the program in a very human and intelligent way, seeking expert assessment of the program's effectiveness. Not surprisingly, he found that the politician's one-sided lampoon was empty and missed the point of the work done by the nonprofit organization.

Here are the details. Hennepin County Commissioner Jeff Johnson hands out a sarcastic award, called the Golden Hydrant (remember William Proxmire's Golden Fleece Award? It's kind of like that.) He recently gave the hydrant to Anishinabe Wakiagun, a residence for homeless, alcoholic Native American men and women.

Why? Because the residence doesn't require the residents to be sober as a condition of their housing.

If you looked only at the surface, Johnson's award might seem reasonable. But Duchshere talked to a number of people who live in the house and found that, not only does it save the taxpayers money on police, emergency room trips, and detox visits, it has actually saved some of their lives. And in the process of meeting them where they are, the home has helped move them toward or all the way to sobriety over time.

As the story said,

A recent study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)...indicates that wet houses result in less drinking and save money by reducing the high costs of detoxification treatment, medical services and jail.

How much does the house cost Hennepin County each year? $39,000. How much does it save? Approximately $500,000.

Mike Goze, the executive director of Wakiagun's parent organization, American Indian Development Corp., sees the financial savings as a secondary benefit:

The primary goal, he said, is to provide a better quality of life and a safe place to live. A 12-step program generally won't help a chronic alcoholic, he said, but Wakiagun residents often increase their level of sobriety despite the fact that they're free to drink....

A detox study done last year at Wakiagun found that a number of residents reduced their trips to detox by 80 percent while living at the home.

Residents are allowed to drink in their rooms or away from the residence, but not in the public areas of the home. Wakiagun offers activities to attract residents to social settings that aren't centered around drinking.

In the JAMA study... University of Washington public health researchers monitored 95 homeless chronic alcoholics before and after they moved into a wet house, and compared them with 39 others waiting to get in.

Before the wet house, the median cost of each of the 95 was $4,000 a month. After a year in the wet house the cost per person dropped to $960, mostly for housing.

Once again, this story reminds me that the perfect should not be the enemy of the good. Thanks to Kevin Duchshere for taking the time to look into the facts.

Note: I can't link to the Star Tribune story, because for some reason it's not on their site. Much of the story is quoted on Johnson's website, accompanying his attempt to justify his remarks and point of view.

Bioethicists Weigh in on Health Care Reform

Today's Star Tribune noted a statement by the Association of Bioethics Program Directors about the health insurance reform situation. These are the academics like Jeff Kahn at the University of Minnesota and Art Caplan at the University of Pennsylvania who spend their time thinking about the tough issues that confront doctors every day.

What do they have to say about the current debate? They state flat out that "the current state of health care is unethical," and point out the top three myths that are circulating about possible changes to the status quo:

• Myth #1: That it would interfere with individual control of health decisions
• Myth #2: That expensive treatments would be unavailable as a cost-control measure
• Myth #3: That older people would be euthanized or hurried toward their deaths. "This may be the most pernicious myth of all," they wrote.

In conclusion, they wrote, "There is no morally defensible reason why some Americans get excellent medical care at costs they can afford and other Americans lose their homes or go into bankruptcy attempting to secure treatment for a seriously ill loved one."

Full statement at www.bioethicsdirectors.org

In the same issue of the Strib, I appreciated this letter to the editor:

Good insurance is meant to be socialist

Health insurance is socialist. Get over it.

In addition to Medicare and Veterans Affairs being "socialist" systems, the whole concept of insurance itself is socialist: The more fortunate subsidize the less fortunate in a collective effort to maximize the well-being (health and wealth) of the group. The aim of any individual may be self-protection, but the only effective and just means to achieve this goal is to maximize the well-being of the whole. The cost of any individual's misfortune is shared by the entire group; that's what insurance is. Once we can swallow the fact that we are all in this particular boat together, perhaps we can agree that it would be nice for us to have a say in how the system is run and where our money goes.

The current private system can't even accurately be called insurance: It's not insurance when companies routinely deny coverage on technicalities and even pay teams of people to find reasons to deny claims; it's not insurance if the administrators work as hard as they can to make sure only the healthy are covered. (Ultimately that just means the taxpayer ends up paying for some of the worst cases anyway.)

The current private system is really just an expensive lottery with bad odds. A public system would help us more efficiently achieve the goal of the healthy subsidizing the sick as opposed to the whole group subsidizing corporate executives and shareholders.

Ben Seymour, Minneapolis

An expensive lottery with bad odds. That just about sums it up!

Plant the Medians!

Check out the ideas that are flowing from the ReBurbia contest. Sponsored by Dwell magazine and inhabitant.com, the contest held out this challenge:

In a future where limited natural resources will force us to find better solutions for density and efficiency, what will become of the cul-de-sacs, cookie-cutter tract houses and generic strip malls that have long upheld the diffuse infrastructure of suburbia? How can we redirect these existing spaces to promote sustainability, walkability, and community?

The finalists were recently posted, and included the Regenerative Suburban Median shown above, designed by Brian Alessi. Here's a side elevation from Alessi's entry:


As a gardener who has recently converted to vegetable growing, I wonder a bit about how wise it might be to grow vegetables in soil that coexists with car exhaust, and also about how safe it would be to work right alongside the cars this way... but then I remember Tom Vanderbilt's point in Traffic about how cars slow down when things get tight.

And I can't help thinking that part of the point of this design is begin a cycle that leads to there being less need for cars in the first place, if suburbanites could grow their own food and have something interesting right in their own front yards (or along their streets, as it were).

Lots of cool ideas to think about in all the finalist entries, many applicable in cities as well.

Via kottke.org

From Homeless to Over-Homed

A painful juxtaposition on BoingBoing today:

Xeni Jardin posted a lengthy clip of a New York Times op-ed by Barbara Ehrenreich, titled "In America, it is increasingly illegal to be poor." The clip included the story of a Washington, D.C., homeless man who was ejected from his shelter bed because there was a warrant for his arrest:

... Mr. Szekely, who is an ordained minister and does not drink, do drugs or curse in front of ladies, did indeed have a warrant -- for not appearing in court to face a charge of "criminal trespassing" (for sleeping on a sidewalk in a Washington suburb). So he was dragged out of the shelter and put in jail. "Can you imagine?" asked Eric Sheptock, the homeless advocate (himself a shelter resident) who introduced me to Mr. Szekely. "They arrested a homeless man in a shelter for being homeless."

Immediately following this story, another post by David Pescovitz told BB readers about a business in the Washington suburbs that designs fantasy bedrooms for (clearly very well-off) children.


The cognitive dissonance almost knocked me over. Maybe BoingBoing is the sound your head makes when whiplash happens.

Travel Day, Continued

Almost no access to the interweb, then two flights, including sitting on the tarmac in a hot plane for an hour and a half.

Not much to say for Sunday, August 9, 2009.

But at least I'm reading a good book (Libyrinth by Pearl North, aka Anne Harris), and will report on that soon.

Au Revoir, Quebec!

It's been a long day of driving, so not much to say for today, but here is one last photo from along the way between Quebec City and Montreal...


I know that poulet is chicken, but I don't know what to make of poulet chubby. I figure it's a branded product (like a Whopper or a Big Mac), but I can't help wondering about the marketing genius who came up with such a name.

Would you want to buy a product called Chubby Chicken? It's a bit too honest, given how commercial chicken farming has engineered large-breasted birds that can hardly stand up.

Les Enseignes des Temps

It's always a joy to be in an unfamiliar place, because you notice the signs more than you do in your regular milieu. And when the signs are in a different language, it's even more fun.


As an American English speaker, one might think this business is targeted at a subset of couch potatoes, but my high school French reminded me that "couche" means "bed." I still didn't know what it meant, though, so a quick check of the Wikipedia told me that it means "late to bed," colloquially translated as "Night Owl" and therefore the nicely designed logo.


A pleasant typographic logo for the Festival of New France, which is being held this week in the lower city.


In the French-speaking parts of the world, I guess tasty food causes you to say "Hummmmm" instead of "Yummmm."


Channeling Mondrian for the folk festival.


A lovely old sign along Cote de la Montagne, heading toward the lower city.


Trés amusant -- perhaps we should call it Hotel Americana?


My translation of this poster is Come in -- the Mummies Await You with Open Arms. Anyone got a more accurate meaning? (Seen on the outside of the Musée de la Civilisation.)


This sign had a major effect on the early part of my trip to Quebec, because every evening at 6:00 they close Rue St. Jean so people can walk in it, and the cafés can have seating on the narrow sidewalks. It's quite a party atmosphere, but if you're trying to drive there, it's a disaster because there's no good way to go around it, due to the many one-way streets.


A fun poster for the extraterrestrials exhibit at the Musée de la Civilisation.


Baby foot?? Dang, what is that? Google to the rescue: It's foosball. Mais oui.

Hamsters Under the Highway

Last night, we joined thousands of other tourists and native Quebecois at a free show by Cirque du Soleil. It was held under the big concrete highway overpasses to the north of the Old City. This (blurry) shot gives an idea of the setting.

Before the show got going, I realized there was some cool graffiti art on the pillars. So I turned on the camera flash and went at it. Here are a few.







Are these hamsters? I'm not sure, but they were fun to see, and were actually only visible once I'd taken the photos with the flash.

The show was fun but (as you can see) extremely crowded and it was hard to see much most of the time. We did the typical American thing at such a large event -- left before it was over in order to beat the crowd. (My excuse is, we were tired and had a long walk home.)