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So here’s a mohawk question: let’s say I intend to be fewer than 200 miles from the Gulf Coast in three weeks, happily dispensing mohawks to those who ask. Do you think 10-20 mohawk leftovers would be enough to send to Gulf Coast relief efforts in which hair is being collected to make hair booms to help with the oil spill? Discuss.

While fighting off the flies became exhausting the first day, it was more than a week before he fully realized the boy was never coming back.

There are ways to tell if someone is from the same area as you. I haven’t lived everywhere, but for the places I’ve lived since being able to form complete sentences and paragraphs I am quite familiar with the litmus tests.

In St. Louis, you would volunteer the name of the high school you went to, and if you don’t, they’ll ask anyway. Why? It is my understanding that it tells people a lot about your upbringing: St. Louis public schools have a LOT of problems now, and have for some years – so most people have gone to either Catholic or secular private schools in the region – sometimes single-sex, sometimes magnet schools, all of this data which generally indicates something about your history in the city.

In Colorado, people often volunteer how many years they’ve lived here, but I prefer testing the reflex reaction to the following statement to indicate if I’m talking to someone who has lived in Colorado a long time:

“We’ve gotten a lot of rain recently!”

For those who aren’t already thinking it, the correct answer for Coloradoans is, “Yeah, but we can use the moisture.” And we can. Much of Colorado is technically speaking a desert. The annual moisture here is small enough that you better xeriscape your lawn or face months of intensively watering your foreign-conditions based bluegrass lawn. Gardens need daily watering for most of the summer, and farmers depend on irrigation systems that are the basis for some pretty crazy water laws in the state. It wasn’t until this year that rainbarrels were legalized…and even then, it is for people on well systems only. According to law, the rainwater falling on your roof isn’t yours, except, in some cases, if you own your well water rights. Water rights are really intense in the West for good reason: much of the water that falls in the mountains and trickles down rivers in Colorado goes to lawns in Arizona, golf courses in Las Vegas, and water fountains in California. A lot of Coloradoans bristle when thinking about lakes in the mountains dropping levels past sustaining their native animal life so a golf course a thousand miles away can be green. This is vastly oversimplifying the situation, but I’m always interested in learning more. I grew up on an irrigation ditch system – it’s where me and my elementary friends hung out (after swimming lessons and lots of rules about the swift water in the 8 ft. deep ditch). Neighbors must work together and obey seasonal rules to keep a ditch system working, and loss of water rights is cause of many a lost friendship and intense litigation.

This is relevant to a book I’m reading right now called Mayordomo: Chronicle of an Acequia in Northern New Mexico by Stanley Crawford about an irrigation ditch system in Northern New Mexico, and it certainly reminds me of the ditch I grew up with. It’s unlikely that water rights will simplify or become better distributed anytime soon, but it’s a good reminder of what it looks like when the water is the power.

Last week, I took a trip to Michigan to see two close friends, and the days were balanced between finding fun things to do together (Detroit’s Roller Derby is a lot of fun, as are Detroit’s dive bars…) and realizing that this is a city on a downward slide into decay. Michigan leads the states with 9.6% unemployment, and just about every other building I passed in the city was boarded up. Entire neighborhoods were seemingly abandoned by city services, with no working streetlights or even stoplights.  It is true that Detroit has cut back on city services because there isn’t the budget for it. A guy on the street asking for change told me he hadn’t eaten for two days. Visiting one friend at work in the Cadillac Building (a towering building with over 40 types of marble in the decor), the ground floor of the building was turned over to be the waiting room for Detroit’s Unemployment Services. Every day, she told me, every chair is filled. And the snow falls and falls and falls, seemingly without end sometimes.

We had a depressing debate, actually, about whether the rest of the country cares enough to save Michigan from what seems like a state-wide economic failure. I worry that every other state won’t want precious funds going to a state that seems too far gone, but my friends who live there optimistically believe the opposite. For the sake of their jobs and safety, I hope there can be a turnaround, even if the new jobs coming in aren’t part of the Detroit automobile industry.

All the same, it was great to spend time with some friends I rarely get to see and see their new digs, their new plans, and help them feel more comfortable in the long Michigan winter. People there are quite friendly, and I love asking them to point out where they live on their anatomical [right palm] state map. And even in a city that appears to be dying, there was a fascinating trick to Detroit buildings: from the outside, most of them look dark and small, but once inside, they are spacious, brightly lit, and often full of people. Hopefully the city too can turn a similar trick.

So, besides the friends and family and good health that I am naturally thankful for, I ask myself, what ELSE am I thankful for? Seriously? Canadians. For several years now, I have had very positive experiences with Canadians – as friends, neighbors, and generally helpful people. Having camped near some Canadians, they have provided high quality booze, henna tattooing, instructions (to campmates, not me) on Vodka Snorting, stories of long tractor-trailer travels through the Northern Lands, gracious offers of glass recycling, Newfie jokes, and friendship. I’m always glad to see my Canadian friends, and am continuously impressed by their generosity. This is the background that leads into a story from this summer, when I was traveling about the western U.S.

Sam, a friend and I were walking through a casino in Nevada after a week of desert camping when we heard behind us someone muttering (in a Canadian accent) something to the extent about how dirty and desert-weary we appeared. This is not really true, since we had showered, rested, and ate regular food at this point, but sometimes people can still spot things like that. We whirled around to face the accuser, to find a pleasant looking fellow and his friend smiling broadly.

“HEY!” The friendly guy said. “Want some Canadian socks?”

DO I!!!  Sam and our friend pointed at me, and the guy thrust a pair of socks in my hands and walked away. Both teased me about how impressed I am with Canadians, but upon further inspection, these are some of the highest quality socks I’ve ever owned. Sam may argue the point, as he salivates over Smartwool socks, but as a person with simple needs, these socks are excellent. Besides the attractive Canadian Maple Leaf at the top, they are made of a high quality cotton, double-stitched at the toe, and with extra padding along the sole. What a great idea! They have already proved themselves as excellent for staying comfortable through lots of walking and standing, especially in cold weather (you can see they’ve been used quite a bit the last couple months). So, that’s what I’m thankful for. Kind Canadians handing me socks in casinos.

…there was a boy. Despite being as frustrated and annoyed as most 13 year-olds, he went to a camp where he took classes with about 90 other adolescents marked early on as smart kids. Sustained on Dr. Pepper, eye-rolling, an encouraging role in DJing, and new friends, he struck up friendships with several people at the camp, including two kids who lived a hour or two north of his town in the mountains of Colorado.

Those two kids egged on the boy, insisting he return letters, send mix tapes of his high school radio show, and ditch school to meet them for slurpees or other ridiculous activities not usually considered worth driving 100 miles round trip for.

One of the kids had a high school friend who loved designing and making costumes.

Time for college came, and the kids headed to different schools: across Colorado, Utah, Rhode Island….

The second kid reached junior year in college, and needed a roommate. Luckily, the two campmates bumped into each other at an outdoor concert the summer before and mentioned the need for a roommate. Turned out that the costume design friend was moving back to Colorado, and set to start that fall at the same school and needed housing as well. Trusting the camp friend’s judgement without a second thought, the costume designer and the second kid became roommates.

They had many parties, with many great costumes…

And along the way, the original friendships from camp held together – including visits to each other’s schools and more often, invitations for the boy to come to the theme parties. By this time, his DJ skills were definitely developing.

College finished for the kid from camp, and graduation meant a trip away from the state for graduate school. There were tears as what was a very fun household broke up for everyone to go their separate ways. However, the kid from camp came back a few months later to see friends, and in the usual way, gathered together as many friends as possible for a short in-town visit, whether or not they usually hung out together in the kid’s absence.

Somewhere along the way, the costume design girl and the boy from camp had noticed all the neat things about each other – and seemed to share a certain goofiness, an interest in similar music, and it wasn’t long before they started dating.

15 days ago, these two people got married – in a beautiful 1920s ceremony complete with handmade dresses for the bride and her bridesmaids, and guests turned out in bowlers, flapper dresses, and long satin gloves to dance, eat cake, and celebrate most of the night. It is hard to believe that now a lifetime together can happen because of a spark from two people I met 15 years ago and helped introduce to each other.
Congratulations, S & N.

It’s not often that I find fiction interesting. When I do pick up a novel, my hopes are that it won’t drag on making me glance at the pile for the next book on my list, which is much more likely to be a non-fiction account of something interesting. I won’t go into my full rant about non-fiction vs. fiction, but it is unusual for me to dwell on a novel and its characters for a while after reading it. That’s what makes Blindness, by Jose Saramago, so different.

Set in an unidentified city, with unnamed characters, and with what would otherwise be an annoying lack of grammar or identification of the speaker in dialogue; the book examines what would happen if an unexplained, very contagious outbreak of blindness broke out across an entire population. Described by those afflicted as a “milky sea”, they are at the mercy of those who can still see, and the quick-spreading epidemic doesn’t inspire charity. This is made all the more interesting to me since my last position dealt extensively with vision – one of the few medical complaints that has as much subjective data to it as objective. Everything we do uses information from sight – especially interaction from other humans.

If such an epidemic really happened, would society survive? We treat blindness in its current forms as a disability, but expect that those with it can lead pretty normal lives, with jobs, relationships, and often a decent ability to live on their own. But if everyone was blind, would this still be the case?

More importantly, in the face of a major crisis, how do those who are determined to keep their humanity and compassion do that against those who would take advantage of each other, with no witnesses so to speak. The results leave me spooked, and yet the book feels completely realistic – some characters are prepared to change their lives to deal with a new and urgent need to depend on others and provide for others in turn even when dignity fails.  And at the other end, horrible, horrible acts are committed when people know they’re not being watched – literally, not seen, not identified and therefore it is almost impossible for these characters to feel guilt.

I also chose to read this book just before embarking on a long road trip/vacation that I think applies. Except for the first time I took this trip, I have been fortunate to be almost completely surrounded by people who express humanity to the fullest: super welcoming, eager to give new people warmth and laughter, work hard together, and solving problems for the good of the group in times of crisis. But this is by far not the norm in any society, and the fragility of group governance is all too obvious if you look around wherever resources are scarce. I am looking forward to the trip, and the confirmation it provides that I can identify and learn from those people who see crisis as a time to improve things, in an environment that doesn’t have any natural consequences for those who choose to instead screw their neighbors.

I should point out that Blindness did win the 1998 Nobel prize for Literature, which is an indication of greatness – and that I loved Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, not that the books are similiar, though both examine humanity in crisis. Both are definitely recommended reading, even if you also prefer non-fiction.

After some cajoling, we both managed to get back to STL for a few days to see friends. Friends who turned out in force! It was a nice present to have friends who let us stay with them and borrow their vehicles (wow, how easy that made it), and of course many friends whom we saw, ate cheap, great food with (oh Mai Lee…how I miss you, and your #126), shopped with, and visited old neighborhoods with.

Perhaps one of the most rewarding aspects was that so many of our friends in this city think a great deal about what MAKES a good city, a good neighborhood, a good block. Sam and I are thinking a great deal about this too after reading the majority of a very dense but altogether sensible book called A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander. Sitting in at close to 1200 pages, I think we should be forgiven for jumping over a few pages, but by and large, this tome on design of all types and sizes of spaces written in the 1970s has a ton of good ideas that seem common sense but don’t automatically spring to mind. Like, what kinds of neighborhoods inspire the residents to walk instead of drive? Some say they want a jumbomart to get everything in one place, but large numbers of people find a corner grocery to be useful for most of their needs. How big should a town square be in order to be more inviting for a variety of people? How do you even design housing to encourage a diversity of ages, socio-economic class, and family types to move in? These questions are thought about a lot when you don’t consider your own city to be ideal, and the residents of STL certainly are hard on theirs. But many of our friends are improving their city actively through day jobs or weekend projects: from working with local arts and youth organizations to renovating a house in a neighborhood that needs a lot of work, from building a rooftop garden at work to becoming a teacher or building a sculpture for a public event, we’re lucky to know so many people who think so much about how to make their city a better place to be. And stranger still, most of these people flow effortlessly between white collar and blue collar jobs – and mingle with a combination of both in their neighborhoods and friend groups. Few cities in the U.S. really achieve this.

That’s actually two concepts, but I still appreciate both. And it’s exciting for us to see all the things our friends have accomplished since we moved – even if it’s buying a ’76 camper named a “scamp” or plotting hijinks for their upcoming wedding. In the meantime, we’ll try to improve the city we live in now, even if most of the residents here have a much higher opinion of their city and don’t believe it needs help, change or any more people in it. It takes time, naturally, to tap in to the improvement elements in a city.

The lack of posts recently is because of traveling. Pictures will go up in the gallery soon, but for the time being, there are other things to tell.

Since the move, we are subleasing in a rather large apartment building, living 7 blocks from the downtown area. This is really great for walking down to restaurants, bars, groceries, etc. In fact, I’ve found a website that identifies exactly what it is I like about the places I choose to live. It’s called walkscore, and you put in your address to get a rating between 0 and 100 (with 100 being a good thing) of how closely you live to various services. It then produces a map and a list of the nearest grocery, movie theatre, hardware store, bar, dry cleaners, you get the idea. Our current score is 88, and our last place was an 82. Aaaaahhh. Quantifying what were previously unquantifiable qualities is very satisfying for engineers…

However, that’s irrelevant to this story. In our building of about 30 units, there is an open area linking the hall to the laundry room and leasing office. It’s where the mailboxes are, and there’s a bulletin board, useful things like that. The weird part is the “free” bookshelf. A bookshelf in one corner accumulates and dissipates….stuff. Sure, there are lots of very dated books and magazines that seem to stay on the shelf, but we’ve seen lamps, TVs, houseplants, what I assume are doctoral theses, and other bookshelves come and go. Sam grinningly brought home one day one of those plastic sheets that magnify whatever is behind it. (One guess as to the first thing he, and probably any boy, wanted to magnify). I topped that by bringing home a gauzy, pink curtain with screen-printed trees on it in various shades of pink.

But the truly WEIRD item found in the pile sat there for close to a week before finding an anonymous new home. A cabbage. A cabbage bigger than the average adult human head. It was bagged in a plastic grocery sack, unassumingly sitting there. Who buys a cabbage and sadly, finds that it does not meet their needs, leaving it instead in the building-wide free pile? And even more strange, who decides, “AH-HA!! Exactly what I wanted! A giant cabbage! ‘Ask, and ye shall receive!’” I just wish I could find out about the adventures this cabbage embarked upon, and am a little sad I never will.

Hello world -

Quite literally, this is my first post – Sam and I are sharing it for purposes of sharing news with friends and offering tidbits of entertainment. Let us know if we do a better job of this online than in person – we can become blogging recluses instead of hanging out if it works better.

At any rate, I feel a need to comment on a St. Louis activity that continues to make me feel like an outsider: Trivia. I have played trivia in other cities, but outside of St. Louis, what passes for trivia is a casual affair – usually the stakes go no higher than a round of drinks, and there is certainly no serious competition, hard feelings, or outside food to the degree seen in St. Louis.

In St. Louis, first, one must be invited to trivia, or involved in an organization hosting a Trivia Night. These events are always fundraisers, which a specific set-up: you can register a team of eight people, each of whom usually pays a fee of $20. If you cannot find eight people, you can risk showing up with less than eight members, because some people show up as singles, just ready to join a partial team. They are usually members of the church/synagogue/childrens non-profit that want to support the fundraiser, but don’t believe they should create their own team. This strikes me as very strange…counting on strangers to allow you to join their team, hoping your skills are up to par (or beyond) the other team members, or that your new teammates don’t drag your score down. Other etiquette involves bringing massive amounts of junk foods: fried chicken, cakes, macaroons, cheetos, twizzlers, iced tea, two liter bottles of soda, sausage, casseroles, dips of every kind imaginable, and anything else one might think would clot an artery. [I must point out, I fail this etiquette point each time, constantly forgetting the courtesy of bringing even so much as a bag of potato chips. Luckily, my various teammates have forgiven me each time.] You must also bring paper, pens, and perhaps wear a hat. Be sure to yell out wrong answers to throw off other teams, and give shouts of “Yay!” or “Boo!” randomly, to throw off other teams about how well you are doing [nevermind that the scores are written on an easel to the side of the MC]. And if you insist on an answer that turns out to be wrong, well, you better hope these people really like you. You may not be coming back.

Despite all this, I find it a fascinating cultural event – entirely MidWestern, entirely Judeo-Christian, and with the etiquette involved, entirely unique to St. Louis. Luckily for the anthropologist in me, Saturday night’s trivia came packed with drama:

My two friends, R & J, who invited me, had done this particular trivia night the year before. That year, they opted for bringing a partial team, and added two women to their team who showed up as singles. It turns out that the team did reasonably well, winning a gift certificate for eight to tour the Schlafly brewery. The two women were very excited, and insisted on giving their names and numbers so that they could join whenever the tour was scheduled by the other members of the team. My friends, unfortunately, were very lazy, and have not, even a year later, used the certificate. They mentioned all of this to me before we walked in because there was a chance the two women would be there this year, and wonder why no one had called them about taking the tour.

That would be an understatement. By the third round, one of the two women came up, and interrogated my friends on their silence over the past year. She brusquely demanded that they call her, if it was actually true that they hadn’t used the gift certificate. Despite a great deal of disdain for R & J, she insisted that she would be going on that damn brewery tour. She rewrote her name and number for them, and huffed off. It affected our concentration, which is why, despite good effort all around, we only made fifth place out of 20 or so teams.

I have to wonder: if you are so angry with your teammates for not calling you, why would you want to invite more discomfort by spending several hours together at a brewery? Wouldn’t you rather forget the whole thing? Or demand the price of a beer or two to “buy out” your share? Why insist on spending more time with people you have told to their faces you are angry with them?

Alas, this is the mystery of St. Louis trivia. Treat the evening casually at your own risk. Bring junk food to share. Shout out wrong answers to throw other teams off. And by all means, you better share any prize you get with your teammates, even if you met them for the first time that same night.

Sometimes, when days are cold, and nights are long, people have to pamper themselves.

Take a moment for yourself, and relax.

Some people wrap themselves in a warm blanket, hold a cup of steaming hot cocoa with both hands and relax with a good book propped upon their knee. Others put on a favored movie or record, and allow themselves to take a luxurious nap. Bubble baths and aromatherapy candles may also be included.

I’ve got a new guilty pleasure, one I’ve enjoyed a few times, and will likely become a habit of mine.

I find a quiet place, settle myself down, put on a pair of headphones, blast the glitchiest drum and bass and breakbeats I can get my hands on, and read “The Economist”:http://www.economist.com. Lately I’ve been happy listening to The Freestylers (particularly their live albums, like Fabric Live 19), and Pendulum’s album True Colours or Live on Breezeblock. But I’ve recently gotten back into some of the new releases by “Bassnectar”:http://www.bassnectar.net which are incredibly good. His beats are raw, the bass is grinding and the limited vocals are radically leftist. Lorin AKA Bassnectar is from Santa Cruz, CA, which is great, because I fondly remember hearing him spin early on at Moontribe beach parties. These days he’s a very accomplished producer, and is touring like crazy. I chatted with him briefly after his set here in St. Louis a few days ago, and he was a real pleasure. He obviously loves what he does and has a great time doing it. His sets reflect his energy, and are always special.

But remember, this isn’t just an opportunity to bang some beats, its about the reading material too. The Economist is one of my new favorite news rags. It’s a weekly news publication, but is very unique. Nearly every article is written in an editorial fashion, and they don’t hesitate to make value judgments or criticisms. However, they are never unfair, and seem to make a legitimate attempt to have their facts straight. The thing I like about it is the fact that they make their personal and editorial biases clear, and are consistent with them. I believe that all news sources are highly biased, and I become very wary when a news source claims to be “fair and balanced” (a favored phrase by Fox News, which is not fair or balanced). Usually this just means that they are making an attempt to disguise their bias, or mislead you into thinking a certain way.

I think the Economist is actually pretty fair, and well balanced. But not in the smarmy, way, but the real way. Their coverage of international politics is better than any other major news outlet, and their UK base and international editorial departments mean you get real coverage about things happening in “poor” countries that are often ignored by mainstream media.

It’s not a perfect news magazine, but it is significantly better than most, as far as I can tell, and I enjoy reading it. The material is quite heady, and even their advertisements are fun. Instead of shampoo ads, there are job advertisements for things like CFO of the State Bank of Pakistan. Maybe I should apply.

Plus, it makes me feel smart. I’m reminded of the Simpson’s quote when Homer is on an airplane and manages to get into first class, he finds an Economist and says, “Look at meee. I’m reading the Economist! Did you know that Indonesia is at a crossroads?” Apparently intentionally, the next issue of the Economist had an article entitled, “Investing in Indonesia, at a crossroads”.

You don’t realize how old fashioned you really are until you search to buy something you haven’t bought in a while. When you arrive at the store, you find that nothing is how you remembered it, and confusion reigns supreme.

In the world of televisions and computers, you expect rampant advancement, but in other fields, you might assume that thousands of years of success with a product design would last a few more years. But that would be foolish of you to assume, because why would you buy new products if it weren’t for new features, even if said features were completely useless?

Today I searched for grill skewers, of the metal variety. I was hoping for a 12-18″ long piece of thin metal, with a pointy end. A loop on one end and a few twists in the metal for easy gripping were features that I would have appreciated, but didn’t require.

However, after checking no fewer than eight stores, all of which claiming to have a ‘BBQ’ department, I was only barely successful in my search. The stores ranged from low end department stores to home stores to import shops to kitchen supply stores, and quite a number of things in between.

It isn’t that no one had skewers. Oh, they had skewers. Some were long elegant curves, meant to fit on special plates sold for the purpose. Others had huge handles with rotating finger knobs for easy turning. One was a skewer basket with a long thin basket attachment that would probably be very handy for cooking krill. If size was important, there were mighty 5 pronged skewers that looked more like the devil’s backscratcher than a cooking implement. Others still were equipped with spring-loaded attachments that served to ‘launch’ the food off the skewer upon completion of cooking, an attractive idea that would probably result in more airborne mushrooms than anything else. They came in all sorts of exotic materials and finishes, and some included their own carrying case. They were all quite expensive.

In a basket by the floor one could also find the traditional, but useless, bamboo skewers.

What was not to be found was a simple metal skewer that didn’t include some ridiculous feature! I had no idea that in the span of a few years we had completely reinvented the skewer. I was unaware of just how much I lacked by not being on the cutting edge of the skewer.

On a broader note, I think things like this are a sign of our countries disappearing middle class. When you buy a skewer, you show your class, everyone who sees you walk from the store now knows to which group you belong. Will you timidly pay cash and slink from the store clutching your little sack of pathetic bamboo skewers? Or do you proudly pay with your Titanium Credit Card, and march to your automobile brandishing your new Stainless Steel Bolt-Action Spring Loaded Ergo-Grip Skewers?

There is no room for the humble working man, who desires a simple but durable skewer for preparing his family’s hearty meals over their charcoal grill? Why must we relegate our citizens to pitiful bamboo skewers, clearly meant to be used over a coffee can full of burning animal feces, or glittering titanium skewers to be used over a Grill-Master 3000 grilling station? Is there no middle ground? Why all the extremes?!?

Anyway, in the end I finally found my skewers, but I had to look a lot harder than any reasonable person should have to look for skewers. Life is hard for the proletariat.

This quote sums up my feelings about much of what we receive as news, both in print and video (yes, this includes much online news as well).

bq. “To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worthwhile. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.” — Aleister Crowley

Sometimes it feels like news is generated more out of a desire to fill time, than an actual need for people to know about certain things. It is important to keep up with the world around you, but at the same time, it is rare that an article in the paper will give you a complete picture. All you get is a ‘factoid’ that remains isolated from everything else you know about the world. You may know that yesterday 4 people died in a fire in central China that may or may not have been caused by arson, but since there is no relevancy to your life, your knowledge of it will make no difference in how you live your life, or the choices you will make.

I like to call it pseudo-knowledge. My head is full, but the links between each factoid don’t exist. It is not a collection of factoids that makes up knowledge, but rather the connections between them, tying our thoughts together, that constitute knowledge. Most news articles supply me with much in the way of factoids, and very little in the way of connections and relevancy. The knowledge that I find changes my life, and influences my decisions, stems from more complete sources which take the time to give a complete picture, rather than just selected tidbits. This ‘real’ knowledge is combined in a thick web within my mind that gives me the power to make more informed decisions. I find that news articles rarely integrate with this web, instead seeming to float about as disconnected noise.

Another term I’m going to toss out is “infonography”, which, like pornography, is often enjoyed with excess, filling, and then overfilling, a basic human desire. Many people (myself included) often find themselves with the purient desire to read more news, simply because they can. The internet has made this almost endemic. I sometimes find myself reading every little article I can, trolling through “Google News”:http://news.google.com or the “BBC”:http://www.bbc.co.uk reading articles. Why? The desire to read them is totally purient. It isn’t rooted in a desire to become a better person through knowledge, but rather a desire to be entertained, without feeling guilty. Sitting around watching soap operas is seen as a waste of time, but sitting around watching the news is not. However, for many people, the two activities fulfill the same desire, entertainment. The fact that one is ‘real’, and the other isn’t, is irrelevant.

This is why my desire to read news waxes and wanes. I believe that a certain amount of news-following is helpful, to keep one informed about things that do affect your life, and to better understand how changes in one part of the world affect other parts, perhaps your own part. However, I try to keep it in perspective. Just because it is easy to move thousands of news articles back and forth across the globe instantaneously through the magic of the Internet, doesn’t mean we should. Just because I can sit down and do nothing except read news articles the moment they are released, doesn’t mean that is a healthy activity. I say this mostly for my own benefit, but many will find the same tendencies within themselves or others around them.

This topic is discussed in great detail, and with much rigor in the book “Amusing Ourselves to Death”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140094385/cowboysofjust-20 by Neil Postman. I recommend visiting your local library and reading it. Postman is a very cynical man, but he brings forth some very good points. Also of note is the fact that the book was written in 1986, about 17 years ago. News then was a bit different from news now, but Postman makes several grim predictions for the future of news, based on negative trends he saw in 1986. Many of these predictions have come eerily true in the years since the book’s publication, and are worth noting when you read it.

Two days ago our sun released the 3rd largest recorded solar flare ever. The flare was accompanied by a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) consisting of about 10 billion tons of ionized gas. The gas is streaming towards us now at about 1250 miles per second.

This image was taken by the “SOHO Satellite”:http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/mission/ (The SOlar and Heliospheric Observatory). Each frame is spaced by about 30 minutes, and shows a ‘halo’ type effect as the flare spreads out and heads directly toward SOHO, and the Earth. The specks seen on the image are interference caused by protons striking the surface of the detector. The large dot in the center is called an occulting disk, and it allows us to get a view of the behavior around the sun, without being blinded by the light and energy from the sun itself. Shortly after taking these images, SOHO had to be placed in a safe-mode to prevent damage from the radiation. For more images and videos of the flare, check out the “hot shots”:http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/hotshots/2003_10_28/ page for this flare at SOHO.

What I really want you to take away from all this is the fact that solar flares of this magnitude are some of the largest and most awesome eruptions of energy that we will ever experience. Space is full of things like this, but rarely do those things actually affect our lives. Solar flares, and the associated ejection of mass, can disrupt communication and power grids, damage satellites, and create powerful and beautiful Aurora Borealis’s, like this one “caught in the Colorado sky”:http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap031030.html, one of the first signs of the flare’s effects here on Earth.

The sun is a violent and terrific thing, bursting with energy. If it weren’t for our powerful magnetic field, we would have never had the chance to evolve, let alone stand outside and enjoy its magnificence. Next time you are outside, think briefly about how much energy it would take to get 10 billion tons of gas moving 1250 miles per second. Then realize that its only another day in the life of a medium sized star.

Links to information about the recent solar activity:

* “NASA – Tuesday/Wednesday Solar Punch”:http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/solarsystem/10.28Flare.html
* “Giant Sunspot Groups 10484 and 10486″:http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap031027.html – Two huge sunspot groups currently visible on the surface of the sun (don’t stare at the sun though! If you want to see, use some techniques found here for “protecting your eyes while viewing the sun”:http://www.mreclipse.com/Totality/TotalityCh11.html#Intro.). These sunspots are the source of the current flare and CME(Coronal Mass Ejection) activity, and are each about the size of Jupiter.
* “SOHO Hot Shot: X17.2 Flare”:http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/hotshots/2003_10_28/ – This is NOT to be missed! Check out more images and MPEG videos of the flare in action, including close-ups of the Sun’s surface.

Thousands of years from now, when the past becomes an indistinct fog, two historians will be sitting in an office, arguing. They are both specialists in a certain time in the past, which was known to its inhabitants as the time between 1700 AD and 2200 AD, a tiny little 500 year block that almost no one cared about, and was covered in less than one week of lecturing in most high-school level World History classes.

The argument today concerns emergency response systems in the landmass that was, for the greater part of the period, known as America. Their infrastructure, what was left of it, made it clear that they had a system by which individuals could report an emergency such as a crime in progress, or a health problem, and have teams of emergency response crews arrive quickly. Scattered documentation suggests that the inhabitants were able to dial a number into their common communication system, telephones, and be connected to a central dispatch for emergency crews. This number was most probably ’911′.

One historian has been studying the cultural significance of a very brief period of turmoil, only a few decades long, that began with an attack against the country known as America by some sort of religious organization. The date the attack occurred on is generally agreed to be 9/11/2001. The historian notes that after the attacks, the numbers 9/11 held cultural significance, as the inhabitants mourned over the attacks, and bolstered morale.

Surely, he argues, the fact that the emergency response code is agreed to have been ’911′ is not a coincidence with the fact that the attacks in question occurred on a date known to the inhabitants as ’9/11′. Surely the emergency response system wasn’t set up until after the attacks, and the number ’911′ was chosen because it evoked a sense of tragedy in the populace, and hence, was easy to remember.

The second historian is skeptical. She notes that in all probability, emergency response teams would have been summoned for the attacks, since much cultural significance at the time was placed on the role of rescue teams. Those had to have been organized teams, she argues, meaning the emergency response system was already in place, and ’911′ had been chosen for other reasons.

The debate goes back and forth for the better part of an hour with both sides finally agreeing to continue the debate at a later time, because the issue really wasn’t a big deal anyway, and they had real work to be doing.

BTW, Madalene flew back in from New York this morning, of all mornings. She brought me bagels, such as the horrifically delicious garlic bagel that I’m eating right now that surely required at least 4 cloves of garlic to make.