A Late-Night Post About Bears and Pools

What does the Pool and Spa Safety Act of 2007 have in common with Hope the Bear?

The irrational nature of the human mind.

Hope was born on camera a few winters ago in a northern Minnesota den. Thousands of people watched and waited for her birth over the interweb. Well, Hope has recently disappeared, probably shot by a hunter. And people are sad about this, writing letters to the editor -- many of whom don't think twice about every other adorable bear that's shot, let alone the cute cows, pigs and chickens they eat every day.

At the time Hope was born, I thought about writing a grouchy post here, but talked myself out of it. It reveals my antisocial side, I know. But this recent news brought it all back.

Ed Lotterman, on the other hand, highlights the irrationality of people who say they want less government regulation, but then turn around and pass a bill requiring all pools to be retrofitted to prevent swimmers from becoming stuck in the drains. A Minnesota child died this way, you see, so there ought to be a law. According to Lotterman, "Drain-related accidents commonly account for less than five of the 2.4 million deaths in our country each year."

Risks are not real to our impaired human brains unless we can see and, ideally, imagine ourselves hugging the thing that's threatened. And it's even better if the threat is posed by something tangible, like a drain you can fix for $3,800 a crack or a mean old hunter.

But a company that spews pollution that will make us all sick some time in the future or that wants to mine the Boundary Waters Canoe Area --  hands off of them, because they're job creators! Let alone the risk of climate change -- that's way too abstract. Unless it involves some bears. Hence the news about polar bears stranded on ice floes, surrounded by water.

Somehow, it always comes back to bears and water.

_______________

Some of the best writing on our all-too-human irrationality can be found at YouAreNotSoSmart.

A Week of Losses

So many deaths this week. Steve Jobs, 56, is the most obvious one, but before that there was:

Peter Benson, 65, founder of the Search Institute, a Minnesota-based research and social change organization. Benson was responsible for exploring the concept of "community assets" -- the positive features of a community that make it likely its young people will grow up to be happy, well-adjusted adults.

Judith Martin, 63. A geographer, Martin headed the Urban Studies Program at the University of Minnesota and had, over the years, a strong influence on planning in the Twin Cities. You could always count on her to bring clarity and a big-picture view to any issue of the day.

Janet Spector, 66, was a feminist archaeologist at the University and one of the founding professors in the field of women's studies there. Her book What This Awl Means was ground-breaking in focusing on the meaning of everyday objects among Native American women.

Derrick Bell, 80. As the New York Times put it, Bell was a "pioneer of critical race theory — a body of legal scholarship that explored how racism is embedded in laws and legal institutions, even many of those intended to redress past injustices."

I didn't know any of these wonderful people, but I'll miss all of them and what they brought to the world. And every one of them died of cancer.

Inside the Box

Am I the only one who — upon hearing the NPR sponsorship blurb for Reputation.com that says "Helping doctors, lawyers and business professionals protect their online reputations" — instantly gets the song "Little Boxes" stuck in my head?

As Malvina Reynolds put it:

And the people in the houses
All went to the university,
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same,
And there's doctors and lawyers,
And business executives,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

I know the wording is not identical, but the rhythm of "executives" and "professionals" makes it feel the same.

(Full lyrics here.)

A Cash-Carrying Member of the Consumer Party

Remember this ad for the Visa check card?


It ran on national television before I started this blog, or I imagine I would have written about it here to criticize its purpose (to encourage people to use plastic instead of cash) and the stupidity of its main argument (that it's faster for cashiers to swipe a card than to make change). I don't know about you, but the cashiers I see tend to be faster with cash than they are with cards.

Well, Mary Hunt, the Everyday Cheapskate, recently wrote a column, saying just about what I would have said. She points out the way our brains process the spending of cash vs. the use of credit (the first causes us a sense of loss and the second doesn't) and the manipulative nature of the ad.

She concludes:

There is no doubt that cash is inconvenient. It makes spending a bit more difficult. And that is a wonderful safety measure. It makes you plan ahead. You can't spend more cash than you have in your possession. You have to think -- something that Visa and MasterCard don't want us to do.

I say we band together to become the consumer credit industry's worst nightmare: cash-carrying consumers.

Yes! Now I just have to follow my own (and Hunt's) advice.

Thought for the Day

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." 

John F. Kennedy, at a White House reception for the diplomatic corps of the Latin American republics, address on the first anniversary of the Alliance for Progress, March 13, 1962. (source)

Apple Picking, Without Apples

An annual ritual: Go out to pick apples at an orchard east of St. Paul. Past years' visits have been good for photos from the pumpkin patch and recycling cans, and this year is no different in its lack of apple photos.

First there is this, from the petting zoo area:


This bit of doggerel (horserrel?) struck me funny, especially the line breaks.

Then some of the non-apple tree foliage:


I knew Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quniquefolia) had beautiful red fall color, but I've never noticed that it had dark purple berries.

And finally the silent, brooding Gas Cans of Easter Island.



In pink and red, no less.

Nostalgia for Lunchboxes

The Vermont Toy and Train Museum, next to the Farmers Diner in Queechee, Vermont, is the place to see vintage lunchboxes.

I found that my camera mostly wanted to shoot two genres of boxes. First, ones that showed television shows I watched:

My favorite show in about third grade.


Remember that creepy Mrs. Beardsley doll?


I can't get over how inappropriate the typeface choice is on this lunchbox. It's a classic example of how historical shows can't help but try to seem current instead of historical.

Second, lunchboxes that were intended for girls:

A few others caught my eye:


From the U.S. Bicentennial in 1976. I remember these Cartoon Modern figures from something, but I'm not sure it was a lunchbox.


I probably like this Dick Tracy lunchbox best of all. What a vision of the future!

Time for a Cat Comic

Very tired tonight because someone mistakenly served me caffeinated tea last evening at 7:00 p.m. and I couldn't get to sleep until after 2:00. So here is a bit of cat commentary from a guy named David on Tumblr:


 Oh, how right you are, David.

SlutWalk, Part 2

Lagging the Pioneer Press by several days, the Star Tribune offered up this story on the upcoming local SlutWalk Minneapolis:



Contrast that with the PiPress's version from earlier this week:


It's funny -- the difference between the play of the two stories perfectly embodies why the SlutWalk organizers chose the name in the first place. As one person quoted in the Strib story put it, "If they called it a women's empowerment march, would the media have paid any attention?"

Ask yourself -- which of these two stories would most readers be likely to read? "Protest March Divides Feminists" -- it's a straight-up news head, yeah. I'm sure that's the one they'd pick.

And don't forget the PiPress ran it on the front page, while the Strib ran it on page one of the Variety section (which some still remember as the "Women's Pages").

So once again, bravo to the PiPress designer and the editor who okayed this layout and placement. On the heels (no pun intended) of the news that FBI stats omit about 20 percent of rapes because their definition of the crime was written by Andy Rooney's grandpa, anything that calls attention to the realities of rape gets my vote.

Ryan Dow, Happy But Still Introspective

Ryan Dow's Introspective Comics is always worth reading, but today's was particularly resonant for me.



Thanks, Ryan.

A Tab Roundup

Here are a few things I've been reading lately in the press.

An excellent two-part series from the Pioneer Press on changes in Worthington, Minnesota, because of immigration and population shifts over the last 10 years. A city of about 13,000, Worthington has gone from being almost a hundred percent white to having a population that's 35 percent Latino, with a fair number of African immigrants as well. One effect is that the downtown is bustling, unlike those in many of Minnesota's other small cities. The city also has low crime and low unemployment. The schools are coping creatively with the influx of English language learners, it sounds like. But I can't get over this chart from part 2, which focused on schools:



This New York Times review of a book with a provocative title: "Is Marriage for White People?" The book is by a Stanford law professor, and the review by an African American studies professor at Princeton. The reviewer writes, the book "doesn’t offer a jeremiad about the decline of black family values in the way of so many others who do little more than regurgitate Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report, 'The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,' which described black family structure as 'a tangle of pathology.' Refreshingly, Banks offers a well-researched and probing discussion of why marriage rates are so low among black Americans."

Debunking the Cul-de-Sac from The Atlantic. It's easy to think that people who live on cul-de-sacs are safer from traffic, but it's not true. A study in California found that the safest cities had one thing in common: They were built before 1930:

These cities were built the old way: along those monotonous grids. In general, they didn’t have fewer accidents overall, but they had far fewer deadly ones. Marshall and Garrick figured that cars (and cars with bikes) must be colliding at lower speeds on these types of street networks. At first glance such tightly interconnected communities might appear more dangerous, with cars traveling from all directions and constantly intersecting with each other. But what if such patterns actually force people to drive slower and pay more attention?

The gist of it is, cul-de-sac residents are safer on their own street, but the dangers of the arterial streets that surround them more than offset that safety.

An NPR story on the possible effects of changing over to truly "smart" cars that don't require driver input. Did you know that 1.5 million Americans have died from car accidents just since 1975; compare this with 1.3 million killed in every war since 1775.

Miami Herald columnist Andres Oppenheimer offered this nice breath of air, reminding us all that while things may seem like they're going downhill, if you take even a short long term view, we are generally much better off today than they were, say, 25 years ago. Worldwide numbers on life expectancy, infant mortality, percent of people with access to water, percent of people in extreme poverty, secondary school enrollment, and the number of armed conflicts have all been moving in a good direction. (Well, I would call it good, since I'm not a misanthrope.) Oppenheimer's thoughts make a nice companion piece to the Louis CK bit I wrote about earlier.

Am I the only one who exclaimed aloud (if that's not redundant) over yesterday's Pioneer Press front page?


This type of design-integrated-into-the-story layout is common in the features sections of newspapers, but you don't usually see it on the front page. The story, in case you were wondering, is about the first "slut walk" in the Twin Cities. The walks are a recent reaction by young feminists to the belief that women who dress "suggestively" are asking to be sexually assaulted. The women who organize slut walks say they are reclaiming an offensive word to call attention to its assumptions, as GLBT activists have done with the word "queer." The story, by Richard Chin, does a good job of representing the different opinions on that idea. But I was most interested in the layout, and how it came to be used on the front page. And whether there will be any reader backlash to the headline, especially in the context of the layout.

Baby Marx -- Fun with the Dismal Science

August was a busy month, so I didn't make it over to the Walker Art Center when the Baby Marx show first opened. Big mistake. It was the most fun I've ever had at the Walker.


Created by Pedro Reyes, it's not an exhibit in the usual sense, not even within the off-kilter world of modern art. It's a bunch of excellent puppets and an exquisite set used to make a sitcom about economics.


Karl Marx and Adam Smith are the stars of the show.


Supporting characters include Frederick Taylor and Vladimir Lenin, plus Stalin, Mao, Che Geuvara, and Milton Friedman, among others.


The set is a modernist public library, designed by Reyes, whose background is in architecture. (It's not quite visible here, but there's a miniature surveillance camera to the left of and above the front door.) For scale, imagine that the black framework below is about 4 feet tall; the building is about 20' wide.



Inside, the library is two stories tall, with a pillared balcony encircling the Information desk. Books in Library of Congress order fill the stacks to either side on each floor.

Excerpts from a couple of the shows shot at the Walker are available on small TV monitors around the room -- but I wished for more!


In this scene, from an episode called "Alienation," Marx and Smith argue over a cookie in one of the Walker cafés. Marx has a cookie, while Smith does not. Smith says that if Marx believes in his own words, he'll share the cookie with Smith. Marx replies that if Smith is true to his words, he would have bought his own cookie. And so on.

Just found "Alienation" on YouTube, whoohoo! Here it is. Note that Marx's voice is a dead ringer for Strong Bad, which made the whole thing much funnier:



Baby Marx reminds me of my shallow knowledge of economics. Time to dig out Adam and Karl and do some reading, perhaps.