Modern warfare: drones attack public connection to battlefields far away

According to a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, insurgent forces in Iraq are using a $26 software program to compromise U.S. Predator unmanned flying drones.

The insurgents are using programs like SkyGrabber, which captures live feeds from the drone’s cameras, allowing them to see what is getting beamed back to U.S. forces. U.S. officials are saying that there isn’t any evidence that insurgents were able to take control of the drones, but the intercepted imagery could give an advantage “by removing the element of surprise” from certain missions.

U.S. military forces have thousands of these drones in service, some of which are capable of carrying out missile strikes. Robotic technology has advanced greatly since the first primitive unmanned recon vehicles (basically glorified remote-controlled airplanes with cameras) used during the first Gulf War. Now, Predator drones can linger silently over a target for hours or days at a time, controlled by U.S. Air Force handlers half a world away.

The abilities these drones possess create new ethical issues. Jane Mayer, author of a New Yorker Magazine article called “The Predator War,” raised a good point during an NPR interview this fall.

“If we can’t feel the impact of the people that we’re killing and we can’t see them, and none of our own people (are) at risk, does this somehow make it easier to just be in a perpetual state of war because there’s no seeming cost to us? ... My sense is that (with) this kind of technology, there’s going to be no turning back.”

P.W. Singer, author of “Wired for War,” put it another way.

“This is leading some of the first generation of soldiers working with robots to worry that war waged by remote control will come to seem too easy, too tempting. More than a century ago, Gen. Robert E. Lee famously observed: ‘It is good that we find war so horrible, or else we would become fond of it.’ He didn’t contemplate a time when a pilot could ‘go to war’ by commuting to work each morning in his Toyota to a cubicle where he could shoot missiles at an enemy thousands of miles away and then make it home in time for his kid’s soccer practice.”

If the American populace knows that U.S. troops will be sent in harm’s way, they ask troubling questions – like ‘why are we doing this?’ With robots, there are no such questions, because robots aren’t people. They aren’t citizen soldiers whose parents and spouses raise holy hell when a loved one doesn’t come back from the battlefield. The impact of a loss of a drone doesn’t dent approval ratings or political capital.

I was watching an interesting documentary the other night called “Why We Fight.” It states the opinion that real opposition to the Vietnam War at home started in earnest when the lottery system made it so that middle and upper class children faced the real risk of being drafted. The armed forces responded, in the wake of Vietnam, with an “all-volunteer force.”. While this may, as some have argued, created a better military, it also had the effect of removing the commonality of military service from American life.

In the decades since, it seems that the military has become more and more of a detached entity from the lives of the average American, who may know few people in the service. Removing this connection has, in my opinion, removed some of the human cost from recent military decisions. Dead soldiers still come home at Dover Air Force Base, sure – but public outcry over their deaths is muted.

Robots will only carry this detachment to another level. Removing the human element from a military operation will negate questions regarding said operations. After all, who cares if we lose a drone? It’s just a robot. Now, if that same mission were being carried out by a human pilot, and that pilot were shot down and taken prisoner, the resulting firestorm of criticism would be damaging. Removing the human removes this risk – and gives those in power a freer hand for performing consequence-free operations.

Remember this, though – those robots perform missions against human beings. They may be our enemies, but their deaths are very real. Sept. 11 may have come as a shock to Americans, but not to those in other countries who’d seen our cruise missiles destroy targets in Iraq or Sudan during the 1990s. We’ve been at war for a long time – and will continue to be ignorant of this war so long as the costs are hidden from us.

In the wake of 9/11, many of us asked, “Why do they hate us?” It seemed a logical question, but only in the insulated bubble that most Americans had been living in. Our leaders take great pains to assure us that each new operation will be bloodless, that we will indeed “be greeted as liberators.”

Robots taking more and more of the work load, combined with the public’s increasing apathy towards years-long operations so long as the body counts are low, will likely only result in us re-asking the same question when another tragedy happens.

I've become one of "those guys" at McDonalds

As my daughter tottered through the dimly lit maze of plastic tunnels and absorbent floor material that made up the McDonald’s PlayPlace, I realized that I’d become “that guy.”

I’m “that guy” who chews his food like cud and keeps an eye on the child whose motion seems less guided as it is compelled by forces she doesn’t understand. I’m “that guy” who utters slowly progressing warnings when his daughter is grabbing on to another child: “Evvvveeeeeyyy? Evvvvey?? No. Let that kid goooo. I meaaaannn it.” I’m “that guy” whose Friday night wardrobe has devolved into a sweatshirt and “comfy jeans” – you know, the “relaxed fit” ones your previous self would have never admitted to owning?

While I always knew I would be a father someday, I never knew what this actually meant. I never thought that I would ever have to fight for time to iron a shirt. I never thought that my ears could train themselves to recognize the particular frequency of my child’s cry and be able to pick it out of a crowd. I never EVER gave any thought to the idea that I’d ever be one of the anonymous balding fathers whose benevolence contributes to make the carefree experience of childhood possible.

It struck me there that my own happy childhood was no accident. It was created and nurtured not only through my parents, but also through the other adults involved in my young life. Now 30 years old, I have moved from taking advantage of this protective cocoon to doing my best to create one for my own offspring. It’s a powerful feeling – and one I am just beginning to understand.

That was my Friday night. I’ve determined that life is divided into distinct modes of operation. In this case, it’s “pursuit” and “maintenance.” Friday nights used to be spent in pursuit of a significant other. Now, those nights are spent maintaining and developing what that significant other and I have created, be it a massive pile of laundry or giving my daughter a trip through a Play Place.

I used to work at this same McDonald’s location when I was 16, sweeping floors and mopping up accidents of the last decade’s children. At the time, I cursed the parents who let their kids made ketchup messes, let them run around with sticky hands, and just seemed so detached from the experience, like they were so stone on Valium that they could care less. Now, I realize that these parents were probably exhausted and, like me many days now, craving a minute or two of what passes for tranquility.

I also realize now the awesome marketing firepower that McDonald’s aims at children and parents. For children, it promises a cheap toy, the luxury of fast food, and a trip to a wonderful place to play. For adults, it offers a trip to relive those same times, all while being able to eat a meal in relative peace as their children run through a plastic maze of diminished responsibility. For every minute my daughter spends in a plastic tube, that’s one more minute that I can eat my French fries and stare blankly into space.

Laws and Those They Don't Apply To

I know sports players are treated differently from regular folks, but this is ridiculous.
In the past two weeks, two Minnesota Vikings (Adrian Peterson and Bernard Berrian) were both pulled over after being clocked at speeds well over 100 mph (Peterson: 109 mph in a 55-mph zone; Berrian: 104 mph in a 60-mph zone). Both were let go with tickets – but if my reading of Minnesota state law is correct, they should have gotten far worse.
According to Section 171.17 "REVOCATION" of Minnesota statute, "The department shall immediately revoke the license of a driver upon receiving a record of the driver's conviction of ... violation of an applicable speed limit by a person driving in excess of 100 miles per hour. The person's license must be revoked for six months for a violation of this clause, or for a longer minimum period of time applicable under section 169A.53, 169A.54, or 171.174." In other words, having exceeded this speed limit, both of these men should have lost their licenses. If it had been you or me, that's probably what would have happened, and I would be writing you from my new home in the garage.
But that didn't happen. If anything, Berrian and Peterson got off with tickets, which don't add to much given the fact that Peterson has a salary of $2.8 million and Berrian has a $13.7 million salary. I'm sure the speeding tickets, which would have seriously dinged yours-truly's budget for the month, will probably end up being a drop in the bucket of a never ending sport-cash waterfall.
Had I gotten pulled over, I would have lost my license and likely been thrown into the back of a squad car. I wouldn't, as Berrian and Peterson did, have gotten a ticket. And I sure as hell wouldn't have one of the troopers, as he hands me said ticket, wish me luck against Chicago. No, I wouldn't have gotten any of this. Why? Because I am no one. I don't throw a ball, I don't get paid millions for it, and I'm certainly not connected to the image of the state. No. I'm jail fodder for sure.
What bothers me so much about both of these instances is that these men acted like they were above the law, which, seeing as how they've been let off easy, seems exactly correct. It's a great message to send to people: I can drive 60 miles over the speed limit on the same public roads you and your children travel on because I am famous. And if I were to hit you? Well, I'll probably get out of that somehow, too.
These sorry incidents are symptomatic of the sports-worship that I think misplaces our priorities as a culture.
To use an old argument, the people who teach our kids get paid squat, but thoroughbred athletes like Peterson and Berrian are paid millions to play a childhood game that's been inflated and distorted beyond any sort of playground fantasy. This is nothing new – the Romans had well-paid gladiators who were no doubt spoiled by success – but I would like to think that the vast gulf between the salaries of those who contribute to society and those who suit up on Sundays would close someday. I guess it won't.
The world can really be divided into two categories: those who can get away with driving 109 mph and those who can't. Where do you fall into this scheme of things?

An entire retail world at my fingertips - but is it worth the cost?

As I walked through a Best Buy this weekend, I was amazed to see how many artists were still represented in their CD department.

Remember those? The five-inch shiny disks we used to buy music on before people under 30 (and some over) started going to the digital convenience of iTunes? Yeah, I thought they were gone, too, but they aren’t. I can remember the last CD I purchased (a Nine Inch Nails album in 2007) like it was yesterday. It was unlike buying something on iTunes, which is convenience itself. I had to drive to the store, walk through said store, use my eyes to find the disc, walk it up to the register, and purchase it. Once I was in the car, I had to unwrap it and manually insert it in the disc player. How exhausting!

While I love the fact that iTunes offers rare and strange things that I would never, ever see on a Best Buy shelf, I wonder if the shift between online and offline retailing is something that truly benefits us. I’m no economist, but it would seem that offline retailing would be more beneficial in the long term, because it requires employees, people to maintain the physical infrastructure, contracts with the people who make the merchandise, people who ship the merchandise – a long chain of economic ties. Online retail, however, requires far less of these – no employees to speak of (or at least not nearly as many as an actual store) fewer shipping needs (as items are likely shipped from a warehouse directly to the customer) no physical infrastructure to build or maintain, greatly-reduced local tax base and so on.

It’s become apparent that technology has changed how we live our lives in ways that unimaginable even several years ago. Who would have thought, for example, that digital camera technology would become so dominant as to render all of the Pro-Ex and Ritz locations an endangered species (taking with them all of the film manufacturing jobs)? Who would have thought that we’d see shrinking CD selections at stores like Best Buy? Who would have thought we'd see formerly-vital video rental locations like Blockbuster Video shuttering stores because it can't compete with RedBox and Netflix? Who would have thought that the U.S. Postal Service, an organization that was formerly seen as a lifetime job, would be posting billions of dollars in losses and shuttering facilities because people don't write letters anymore? Who would have thought that’d we’d see entire large chains like Circuit City fall under the combined weight of Best Buy’s market dominance and the Internet?

If it seems like the so-called economic recovery isn’t apparent, I think part of it has to do with entire industries as we knew them not even a decade ago no longer existing in a meaningful form. Circuit City alone took more than 30,000 jobs with it when is collapsed earlier this year. And if you take away those jobs, there are going to be people spending less money, right? How does this benefit us?

While the Internet has all but turned the retail world on its head, I don’t think it’s something that benefits us long term, much in the way that I don’t think that shipping off many of our entry level manufacturing jobs overseas has done us any favors. No one can stop the inexorable march of technology, but I can’t help but think that there’s a price to be paid in terms of human employment, be it here or elsewhere in the country. Remember, behind every shuttered Ritz Camera and Circuit City facade lingers memories of employees with families to feed that contributed to the local tax base. Can we really say that Amazon or eBay (both of which I happen to love, full disclosure) have that same benefit?

Here’s a glimpse of things to come. When my dad was looking at a dual VCR/DVD player at Best Buy, he asked me to run to Target to price compare. When I came back with the answers, he asked me an interesting question. “Where else could we go to look for these?” We sat there in silence. No easy answer came to mind - at least anything in the physical world that we could drive to. Perhaps this is the future of commerce – sending money to people unseen in places unknown, and then wondering why local retail seems to be withering on the vine.

There is a cost to have this convenience we’ve all come to expect, and whether or not we realize it, it’s something we’re all paying, be it as a customer with few local options or someone who worked in an industry that no longer exists.

My Heart Will Go On-Board the Titanic

From the moment I saw the first pages of the December 1986 issue of National Geographic, the RMS Titanic had me hooked. I talked about the disaster to anyone in my first-grade class who would listen. I read, and re-read, the article to the point of memorization. My biggest Christmas gift next year was a book about the expeditions to find the wreck written by Robert Ballard, the man who was featured in the National Geographic articles. I made Lego Titanics. I was able to draw the ship from memory by age eight, and would tell anyone who would listen that the fourth funnel was actually a fake. I read every singles scrap of information on both the ship and the sinking. For some reason, it spoke to me, even at a young age. It felt, to put it simply, mine.

One of my most prized possessions is an original copy of a 1912 book, “The Sinking of the Titanic and Other Great Sea Disasters,” published mere months after the disaster. I found it when I was 12 in an antique store, and gladly paid the $10 price that guy wanted for it. It shot up in value in 1997, when James Cameron’s “Titanic” created another legion of fans.

While I appreciated the interest, part of me felt jealous in the sharing. Where had you people been, I imagined asking, when I was making sand Titanics on the beach in Door County in 1989? Still, the movie did a lot to bring awareness to the event, even if no one named Rose or Jack had sex in the cargo hold in an act of rebellion against a cruel fiancé. One of the offshoots of the interest created in the movie was the traveling exhibitions that were made available for public viewing across the nation. I attended my second one tonight (the first being in 1999) at the Science Museum of Minnesota. I'm glad I was able to go (it was a birthday present), because any time you can stand next to the salvaged D-Deck gangway door from your icon and look through original window glass, it's a good time. It was a well-produced and informative display, but again, I found my old jealousies coming to a head. As I was standing next to a silhouetted outline of a lifeboat on the floor, I suppressed the urge to grab the person standing next to me and scream, with froth coming out of my mouth, “How many men were used to test these in Southampton before they were put on board? How many?” (The answer: 70). I wanted to bomb the crowd with the trivia that is lodged in my brain, to prove that I was somehow more Titanic than they were.

Still, I thought there were many moving artifacts presented in tasteful displays. What moved me the most was a simple pair of black woolen socks that belonged to someone who had died. They were found in his suitcase, along with a pair of pants and a vest, and brought to the surface years later. They moved me because they were so simple and humble. The man had taken them off to pack them, and died before ever getting a chance to wear them again. It’s tragic, in an infinitesimal way. The Titanic is a rare tragedy. If someone had a traveling exhibition on the Hindenburg, maybe a tenth of the people would show up. If someone had a traveling exhibit on the worst air disaster in history (two 747s colliding at Tenerife, Spain, which killed more than 580 people in 1977) it would be just me, and only if I wasn’t busy that day. No, Titanic is special – special because the people on board had so much time to decide whether or not to attempt to change their fate – to fight against an order of “women and children first;” to fight against an English class system whose raw survival percentages (63 percent of first-class passengers survived; 25 percent of those in third-class did) indicated just who was on top of the pile in life. The sinking is also unique because it took more than two-and-a-half hours for all of this human drama to play out, with all of the emotion and dreadful majesty that the spectacle encompassed.

The sinking wasn't even the only one of its kind in that era. The Empress of Ireland, another White Star liner, sank with more than 1,400 people aboard in May 1914 off the coast of Canada. She took nearly 1,000 of those people to the bottom with her - but most of those people were poor immigrants, and that ship sank in less than 20 minutes, making any sort of memorable dramatic narrative far less memorable than the agonizingly slow death of Titanic. With World War I less than six months away, these deaths would seem paltry in comparison to the millions lost on both sides during a four-year slog through the trench warfare meat grinder.

Towards the end of the exhibit, I saw a placard that explained how the artifacts were preserved, and how “even as you read this,” items still on the sea floor were rotting away due to the passage of time. These items, it said, needed to be preserved because (paraphrasing here) of their historical significance due to the era they represent. I take issue with this claim. It’s one thing to take items from the Titanic simply because you can make a whole hell of a lot of money doing so, but it’s quite another to claim that you are doing it in the name of preserving some era that people really don’t care about anyway. Items from this era are regularly cleaned out of Grandma’s house and given to Goodwill (if they are lucky), or thrown away out right. The only reason that these particular artifacts are worth preserving is because they were on the Titanic, pure and simple. To claim anything else is disingenuous.

I think Robert Ballard had the right idea in wanting to leave the site alone after he found it, to not take anything except photographs. Since 1986, the wreck has become something of a tourist attraction. Countless relic recovery expeditions have been launched to the site, and a couple even got married in a submersible on the wreck in 2001. Any dignity this site once had has been stripped by the same sort of greed and lust that drove men to build the biggest ship in the world in the first place. In its day, Titanic was the latest product of a culture whose sense of cleverness had swelled to the point where they had the nerve to create something and say, in the words of an anonymous deckhand, that “God himself could not sink this ship.” If anything, it reminds me that the same sort of smug satisfaction that we’ve somehow mastered fate through technology is just as alive and well as it was before April 14, 1912, when 50,000 tons of steel and iron began to rot away on the Atlantic seafloor as an unseen reminder of the costs of hubris.Perhaps an exhibition like the one I toured tonight is simply a reminder that time heals all wounds. I can’t imagine that it would have been a big hit had it been done in 1925, when the people who’d been on it and those who’d read about it in the papers were still alive, but now that they are all dead and gone, a new generation is curious and emotionally detached enough from the original event to find interest in it. It makes me wonder if, 90 years from now, my great-great-great grandson will be touring a 9/11 exhibition and yawning in boredom as his father explains that the steel column in front of him came from Tower Two. One irony with Titanic is that sea travelers were safer in the wake of the disaster. Ships of the time, where were getting bigger and bigger as creators designed new ways to build them, only had to carry a small amount of lifeboats. Remember, Titanic had the legal number of boats that was required – it just happened to be enough for 40 percent of the people on board. Also, radios of the time could be turned off, making a distress call pointless if no one was around to hear it. Both of these things changed in the wake of the sinking of Titanic.

The final irony? Had Titanic stayed afloat, she would have only been “the biggest ship in the world” for another month and 10 days. In May 1913, the Hamburg American Line launched the SS Imperator, which was 30 feet longer and 1,600 tons heavier than Titanic. In all likelihood, she would have ended up being sold for scrap, as her sister ship RMS Olympic was in 1934. She would have been forgotten by all except a handful of ship buffs, like yours truly, who also remember the RMS Britannic, the RMS Empress of Ireland, the SS Normandie, and many others who met their end at the end of a scrapper’s torch.

So, as I walked out of the exhibit with my replica third-class coffee mug and a photo of my family and I superimposed against the grand staircase, I felt a bit guilty, like I was an accomplice to being a disaster voyeur. On the other hand, it’s perhaps appropriate to quote a t-shirt which was popular as a form of late-90s backlash to Cameron’s blockbuster movie: “The ship sank. Get over it.”

The haves, have-nots, and state dinners that make me lose my appetite

Usually, the haves and the have-nots are a little more subtle than this, but the evidence on how both are being treated are slapped all across the front page of today’s issue of the Star Tribune.
The bottom story, “Charities trimming turkey dinners,” is about how local charities have cut back on Thanksgiving dinners for poor people in the wake of the current economic state. According to the article, ICA Food Shelf gave 900 turkeys away last year. This year, the number dropped to 430 because of a lack of funds. Next to this article, in a green sidebar on the right side of the paper, a small snippet speaks volumes: “Nearly 1 in 7 parents with grown children say they had a “boomerang kid” move back him in the past year, said a Pew Research Center study. One in seven. That’s a quarter of a grade school classroom living with their parents.
Up higher on this page, in the same column, is a teaser called “A Festive Feast for the Obamas,” which outlines a “lavish outdoor feast” for their first state dinner. Close to 320 people attended the event, which is given more coverage on page A3. When I say “coverage,” I don’t mean, “article.” This is a full-page spread about the menu (created by guest chef Marcus Samuelsson), the entertainment (provided by Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson, among others) and the gown Michelle wore (a champagne-colored number by Naeem Khan). The lead paragraph in the story drips with palpable awe and enthusiasm: “Each table for 10 was draped in green apple-colored cloths and napkins, offset by the sparkle of gold-colored flatware and china, including the service and dinner plates from the Eisenhower, Clinton, and George W. Bush settings. Floral arrangements of hydrangeas, roses and sweet peas in plum, purple and fuchsia were meant to evoke India’s state bird.”
This isn’t journalism. This is public relations fluff, and I am ashamed that news services spent the time and money to cobble this pageantry together. This smacks of the trappings of royalty, which, if memory serves, is one of the main reasons we split from the British in the first place. I’m also ashamed at the very fact that such luxury exists when so many are suffering. If George W. Bush had done this, in the midst of a recession, I could foresee calls from various corners saying that he is out of touch with Main Street and the common man (bear in mind, I am no fan of W.). But with the Obamas? It’s all apple-colored cloths and napkins, apparently.
This honeymoon crap needs to stop. The man has been in office for a year now. I for one would like to see an end to this type of fluff coverage. I understand – I get that Barack loves to play golf and basketball. I get that Michelle has an organic garden. I get that the kids love living in the White House. I get it. It’s been pounded into my brain over and over again by PR machinery that rivals the treads of an M-1 battle tank.
I get it – and I’m tired of it. It makes me angry that someone in Obama’s position could be so tone deaf in how this appears to people like me – taxpayers who can barely afford a meal at McDonald’s. I think the right thing to do in this situation would have been to take the money used to buy all of the glitz at that state dinner and donate it to the same food shelves that are trying to feed the have-nots, who don’t have the type of political connections to eat a “mostly vegetarian” meal off the White House finery. I think it would have been appropriate, given the current situation, to have a more restrained meal, perhaps even taking the time to recognize those who are going hungry or relying more on their local food shelves now than ever.
During the Civil War, Lincoln was outraged to find that his wife, Mary Todd, had been remodeling the White House without telling him.
“It would stink in the land,” he said, to ask Congress for more money “when the poor soldiers could not have blankets,” and paid the costs himself rather than approve any more bills for “flub dubs for that damned old house.” (“Did Lincoln own slaves? And other frequently asked questions about Abraham Lincoln” by Gerald J. Prokopiwicz).
It seems that Obama is unwilling even to give up the excesses of a state dinner. Is this the departure from “politics as usual” we were promised? If so, I’m disappointed.

Hanging up.

My finger wavers over the power button, moving closer and closer to turn the device off, but in the end, my cell phone always wins. It never turns off.

I was listening to an interesting NPR commentary this morning from a woman (I didn’t catch her name) saying that she had spent more than $7,000 on a cell phone over the past decade and had never once used it for the sorts of emergency calls (stuck in a ditch, stranded at the airport, etc.) for which they are apparently most useful. The commentary ended with her saying that she was going cold turkey, and shutting the phone off. I wish I had her courage.

I don’t like the thought of being reachable at all times. The simple answer I get to this statement is usually something along the lines of “Well, why don’t you just turn the phone off?” My reply is equally simple: because of voicemail. Even if I shut the phone off, someone could leave a message – a message that I, being the completist that I am, would feel compelled to answer. So, along those lines of thought, shutting the phone off saves me nothing but the ring of the phone. Its obligation is still there. Waiting.

Cell phones have changed us, as this commentary stated. We’ve become ruder, we have shorter attention spans and, perhaps most egregious of all, are more self-centered. I think cell phones are perhaps a prototypical antecedent for why Facebook and Twitter exist. It is communication not for a purpose, but for simple communication’s sake. I don’t really need to tell anyone that I am having a sandwich for lunch, but with modern technology, I can, and, according to media professionals whom I seek to emulate, should. Remember – it’s not what you say, it’s how much you can say it, and in how many platforms.

I don’t want people to be able to reach me at any given time. I don’t want my work to be able to reach me whenever they want. Granted, neither of these things happens very often, let along at odd hours of the night, but they could, and that’s what bothers me. The potential for interruption has become an interruption in itself.

In the end, I think we were all lied to. Cell phones haven’t improved our lives; they’ve simply changed them, in my opinion for the worst. We all buy into the advertising, showing photogenic people talking to their photogenic friends in their photogenic calling circles, and the implication is made that we too could be one of those people – wanted, needed, and reachable for all sorts of fun and excitement. My reality does not jibe with this. If anything, the silence that my cell phone’s lack of activity during its first few days of operation reminded me that nothing had changed, that I was not one of these people – but before, it wasn’t an issue, because there wasn’t a phone not ringing to prove it.

I wish I had this woman’s courage. I wish I had the ability to just chuck this stupid thing in the water where it belongs, and have enough faith in myself and in those who know me that I could still hear something important in a timely manner without this electronic ball and chain. I wish I had the courage to hang up, and really start living in the moment, without the distraction of what might happen when the phone rings, and brings me an electronic stimulus that never fails to make me drop what I am doing in the hopes of some greater reward.

"Old Dogs" has me barking mad

How does John Travolta keep getting work?
For the past week, I’ve been assaulted with previews of his latest movie, “Old Dogs,” which seems to be a variation of “Wild Hogs,” his 2007 comedic outing, only without motorcycles. Let’s hear the plot of this sure-fire Oscar winner: “Two friends and business partners find their lives turned upside down when strange circumstances lead to them being placed in the care of 7-year-old twins.” I can almost imagine the pitch at whatever board meeting green-lit this cinematic turd: “It’s Robin Williams! AND John Travolta! WITH TWINS!”
Everything about this movie, judging from the preview, smacks of bland inoffensiveness. Let’s face it: Robin Williams isn’t Robin Williams without being coked to the gills, and Travolta isn’t Travolta without disco music or witty Quentin Tarantino dialogue. These two have made so many insulting movies during the past decade (Travolta: “Swordfish,” “Wild Hogs,” “Battlefield Earth;” Williams: “Bicentennial Man,” “License to Wed,” “A.I.”) that they gone totally beyond the pale of what passes for acceptable Hollywood conduct. Have our standards fallen so low that these two has-beens can keep cranking out clunker after clunker and still find work?
Oh, I can hear the screams already. “Robin Williams is funny!” Yes, Robin Williams CAN be funny. I admit that. I loved “Death to Smootchy.” But he’s guilty of at least this much: it seems he will do any movie, no matter how terrible, for a paycheck. He’s become a comedic Robert DeNiro, turning in performance after performance of the same shtick. He’s almost become a parody of himself. Travolta is much the same. “Pulp Fiction” brought him back into the mainstream as a legitimate star, and ever since, he’s proven that the comeback he earned with that performance was a fluke. Come to think of it, these two belong together: Mork from Ork and Vinnie Barbarino, lighting up the silver screen. That’s right, folks – the 1970s never ended.
Watching the preview for “Old Dogs” is so painful that the only humorous item I find in it is that the movie itself will probably do OK in the box office, given that there is a relative scarcity of movies that both adults and kids can see and not be completely bored to death. If anything, it’s evidence that movies marketed to appeal to more than one age group have a higher failure rate than those aimed at a specific audience. I wonder what this film’s investors were thinking. If I were them, I would have sunk my money into a safer bet, like a direct-to-DVD “National Lampoon” movie loaded with innuendo. It’s a sure-fire moneymaker.
As a new parent, I have accepted the fact that I will more than likely have to sit through at least one variation of “Old Dogs” in my parenting lifetime. You’ll be able to recognize me pretty quickly: I’ll be the guy in the front row with duct tape over my mouth and steam coming out of my ears, boiling over at the fact that I can pay nearly $10 per ticket and this is the best that Hollywood can give me.

When someone great is gone

As my wife’s relatives sat around a dining room table and discussed what to include in her grandfather’s obituary, I looked down to see a copy of the days newspaper open to that particular page. It was a mixture of tiny text and smaller photos of happy-looking people, gazing out to the world with all of the wonder and delight their faces could muster. It was, I thought, the end result of the discussion the relatives were having at that particular moment.
It had been a good day up until I got the message. The sun was out, the winds were warm, and I faced the prospect of a birthday party that night for all of the family members who were having birthdays in November. I knew that Julian, my wife’s grandfather, would not be there that night, but from what we’d heard, the knee surgery he’d undergone earlier in the week had proceeded smoothly. After getting home from church and laying my daughter down for a nap, I happened to look at my phone. I saw there was a message.
“Hi, Joe, this is Kitty (my wife’s aunt). I’m sure you’ve already heard, but Julian passed away this morning…”
The November birthday party was still on, she assured me, because we’d all need to convene and figure out what we’d do regarding the funeral arrangements. I saved the message, and put the phone down. The silence in the house was startling. My wife, whom I presumed did not know about her grandfather passing away, was at dance rehearsals. I called her several times, and finally told her the bad news.
I never realized this before, but every single obituary on a typical newspaper page is a product of the same resonating bad news. It starts at a main source, and spreads like a ripple in the family waters, reaching ever-distant shores, inspiring the same reactions of sadness and disbelief. It’s also a reminder of our own precious mortality, which never seems as vital or fleeting as it does when someone who was always there before now isn’t.
I wasn’t terribly close to Julian, but I knew him well enough to say that he had a long and fruitful life. In fact, many of the people on the obituary page seemed to have had that much in common. As a writer, it raises a serious question: how do you summarize someone’s life, with all of its joys, slings and arrows, in a single paragraph? It seems an impossible task – yet it is done hundreds of thousands of times every day.
I will never look at the obituary page the same way again.

“The worst is all the lovely weather,
I'm stunned, it's not raining.
The coffee isn't even bitter,
Because, what's the difference?
There's all the work that needs to be done,
It's late, for revision.
There's all the time and all the planning,
And songs, to be finished.”

-LCD Soundsystem, “Someone Great”

Don't turn the page on the humble book

I’m going to start today’s entry with a little parable. Don’t worry; this will make sense with what’s coming after it.

Euripides rolled up the papyrus scroll and placed it on the table with nearly a dozen others containing the original of Aeschylus, the Greek playwright. The scrolls were among the million or so that made the Library at Alexandria one of the marvels of the modern world. As he rolled up the scroll, he turned to his co-worker, Hypatia.
“You know, this place is great and all, but is it really a smart idea to have all of our ideas in one place?” he asked. “I mean, paper burns, right?”
“Oh, come on,” Hypatia said. “This is Egypt. Nothing’s going to happen to us, or to this library…”

Of course, that proved to be untrue. The library was burned to the ground in 391 AD as part of Christian Emperor Theodosius I ordered the destruction of all "pagan" (non-Christian) temples. Now, nearly 2,000 years later, not one of the million scrolls remains. Why? In my opinion, this happened because the Egyptians put all of their eggs in one basket. They thought, as I’m sure we do now, that their information was going to be somehow permanent because of it, but history, as it often does, has other plans.
I was reminded of this while making breakfast this morning, while a host on NPR was discussing how Barnes and Noble, the venerable bookseller (and one of my former employers) was getting into the business of developing their own electronic reading device to compete with Kindle.
The device, called a “Nook,” sounds impressive. According to an article in Wired.com, it can hold digital versions of 1,500 books. The Nook also comes with built-in WiFi, 2GB of internal storage and an MP3 player. If you go by features alone, it beats a book hands-down.
In fact, in a digital age, it makes sense to NOT make books: you have to cut down trees, make the paper, print to pages, bind them, ship them, and finally, hire some snotty kid who just graduated from St. Cloud State with a journalism degree to sell them for $7 an hour. A digital book, on the other hand, exists as the sort of miraculous “ones-and-zeroes” that make our modern lives possible. It’s cleaner – it doesn’t create paper waste, doesn’t involve manufacturing in the traditional sense, and, best of all, it’s sold by computer, not a snotty college kid.
Here’s my worry with this stuff. For now, the humble book is more or less holding its own as the dominant literary format, but the Internet, and devices like the Kindle and Nook, are closing the gap with each passing year. It’s like cell phones were in the 1990s – a luxury item that now, a mere decade later, is a ubiquitous household fixture. I could foresee a future where the book is eventually eclipsed by these sorts of electronic mediums – mediums that require infrastructure, power, constant Microsoft updates, etc.
The ancient Egyptians were probably much like we are: smugly confident that whatever we build will last forever, that nothing will ever happen to the sorts of self-aggrandizing towers we build for ourselves. Unfortunately, nothing lasts forever, and all it would take to have our own “Library at Alexandria” moment is for a series of solar flares to destroy all that we have worked so hard to create – including the digitally-store knowledge we’ve accumulated along the way. Here’s where books come into their own. Unlike their digital brethren, the only things they require to operate are a decent light source.
I’m not against digital progress. But at the same time, I think humanity needs to temper this desire to relentlessly “improve” everything to death. Our world, and our society, is more fragile than any of us would like to imagine, and if the unthinkable were to happen, I’d like to know that all that we’ve learned along the way would not be lost because we converted it into a format that ceases to exist when the society that created it does.
We shouldn't face the prospect of an intellectual dark age simply because we ran out of battery power.

A Front Row Seat to "Progress" at 12:26 a.m.

With each concussive blow, the shock wave traveled from the heavy moving equipment working on the Crosstown reconstruction project to my house, shaking the house, and making it impossible to sleep.

That’s right. They were doing this at 12:26 a.m. this morning.

Sleep. Ha.

For the past few weekends, work crews working on the project have been taking down parts of the old freeway infrastructure (as there is a freeway wall in the way, I can never tell which) starting around 10 p.m. Friday nights, and going until the early morning hours. Usually, this is something we can eventually tune out, but last night was the worst yet. I’m not sure what they were doing, but it sounded like a war zone outside.

The jackhammers were the machine guns, the heavy equipment (probably bulldozers) was the tanks, and whatever was hitting the ground and causing my house to shake was the artillery. I’d gone to bed reading a book called “One Soldier’s War,” written by a Russian solider who had fought in Chechnya, and it reminded me of a passage he’d written about being on the front lines in a trench, trying to sleep. I’ll paraphrase: you sleep, but you don’t really sleep.

After 15 minutes of this, my normally-calm wife let loose a torrent of profanity, and went to go look out the front window. Not only were they working, but they lit up the entire scene using four or five of the brightest floodlights I’d ever scene. It was like they were playing night baseball with Cats. I shot some video of the scene, providing my own narration, and went back to bed, or tried to. Somehow, our 10-month-old never woke up.

My wife borrowed my earplugs and eventually went to sleep, and I contented myself, using “One Soldier’s War” as a sort of metaphor: I was behind the front lines, I was warm and safe, and I could deal with the noise. Eventually, I fell asleep.

This project has been going on for more than a few years now, and in that time, we've seen our freeway wall taken down (meaning friends could see our Christmas tree from the freeway, a sort-of nice benefit) and rebuilt, our front street torn up and redone, and have fallen asleep more than once to a symphony of back-up alarms, compacting rollers and the banging gates of dump trucks.

We've had windows crack. We've had things fall off of shelves. We have worried, at times, that our 60-year-old house won't take the strain. Somehow, the old girl always holds together.

There have been times when I've wanted to go out and ask the workers when they'll be done, or if they have any clue how much this activity affects the lives of the people who are closest hit by it. Ultimately, I realize that these workers are mere cogs in a huge machine, and talking to them would be about as effective as sneezing at a dragon. I scheme about recording the noise with the best equipment money can buy, renting a flatbed truck covered in speakers, finding the homes of the heads of the project, and blaring to them, in the middle of the night, just exactly what we fall asleep (or don't) on a regular basis).

"What's that, officer? You say this noise level is criminal? Well, that's exactly the point I'm trying to make!"

It's evil, I admit. But a lack of sleep can do that to people.

I understand the need to fix the infrastructure we use every day, and I understand why they do it at night. But this is our home. We can't go anywhere else. the reconstruction project is something that’s easy to understand during the daylight hours, when you aren’t trying to go to sleep amid utter cacophony. It’s amazing how important things can shrink in comparison when matched against needed sleep.

The best part about this entire experience is that, as in the past, we will no doubt get some form letter from MnDOT on Monday morning, days late and written by someone who lives in a place like Prior Lake and doesn’t fall asleep to construction noise, that we could expect some noise disturbances from night construction Friday night.

I’ll hang on to that letter. I will no doubt use it, in the form of chewed up paper, to make crude earplugs to try and blot out the sounds of “progress.”

"It was clear to me that Dylan entered the school with the intention of dying there" - Columbine parent breaks silence

In the 1990s, Generation X was spared much of history’s cruelty – the job market (in the latter half of the decade) was booming, there was no draft, no pandemics, and the high point of fashion for the better point of a decade was comfy flannel.
For me, that innocence of that decade shattered April 20, 1999, when two young men killed 11 others before taking their own lives at Columbine High School in Colorado. I watched the event live on CNN, spending nearly five hours in front of a flickering screen that promised death at every angle. The legends started early: the boys did it because of Marilyn Manson, they killed Rachel Scott because she believed in God, they were bullied, etc.) For weeks afterwards, it was hard to talk about anything else. Part of this was the unspoken fear that the person next to you, or even you yourself, could be capable of such an act if pushed too far.
While we heard from plenty of victims and the families, we never heard from the two shooter’s parents. In a way, I don’t blame them. What do you say when your child does something so unspeakable? Are there even words in the English language that can convey the depth of trauma that would likely result in knowing that your progeny was responsible for the deaths of 11 people in the worst mass-shooting at a school in American history (until 2007)?
This week, one of those parents broke her silence. In an interview with O Magazine, Sue Klebold, the mother of Dylan Klebold, wrote that she could not accept Dylan's participation in the massacre until she connected it with his desire to die.
"Once I saw his journals, it was clear to me that Dylan entered the school with the intention of dying there. And so in order to understand what he might have been thinking, I started to learn all I could about suicide."
In a video shot that morning, Dylan and Eric Harris posed in their military-style clothes, and Dylan said goodbye to his mother (transcript found at www.acolumbinesite.com).
Eric: "Say it now."
Dylan: "Hey mom. Gotta go. It's about a half an hour before our little judgment day. I just wanted to apologize to you guys for any crap this might instigate as far as (inaudible) or something. Just know I'm going to a better place. I didn't like life too much and I know I'll be happy wherever the f-ck I go. So I'm gone. Good-bye. Reb..."
Eric: "Yea... Everyone I love, I'm really sorry about all this. I know my mom and dad will be just like.. just f-cking shocked beyond belief. I'm sorry, all right. I can't help it."
Dylan: (interrupts) "We did what we had to do."
Even after the echoes of gunshots and police sirens faded away on the high school campus, the hatred took more lives. Carla Hochhalter, whose 17-year-old daughter was paralyzed in the shootings, shot herself in a gun store while the clerk had his back turned to do a background check. She later died at the hospital.
In a way, I think part of all of us died that day – the part of us that wanted to believe that school was a safe place; the part of us that wanted to believe that evil was something that existed somewhere else; and the part of us that knew, deep in the back of our minds, that it was possible to leave for school one day and never come home.

Confessions of a thrift store shopaholic

They were diamonds in the rough, but once they were rubbed to a shine, their dazzle was brilliant.
This past Saturday, I went shopping for a new pair of dress shoes. After search several thrift stores, I found them – although they weren’t quite “foot worthy” yet. Whoever had last owned them had apparently not known how to take care of leather, and the exterior was caked with snow salt. The interior, however, was in good shape, and the leather foot liner bore a more important mark of quality – the words “Cole Haan.” A little while later, after I’d cleaned the interior and exterior, and polished the black leather with several coats of polish, the shoes gleamed like new. The best part? This pair of shoes originally retailed for $130 – and I bought them for $2.99.
I’m addicted to thrift shopping. To me, there’s no better present in the world than going into a thrift store and having someone say, as my friend Becky did on my 24th birthday, “Here’s $20. Buy whatever you want.” I don’t remember what I bought that night – but I remember being on top of the world, feeling like the entire store was mine for the asking. It basically was – Savers in those days was the type of place where you could find jeans for $5, and shirts for even less. Hell, you could find pretty much anything there – like Russian army jackboots, World War II leather flying trousers, and the metal detector I bought could attest to. It was like having access to the ultimate garage sale; open daily from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.
You see, a good thrift store is like the beach where cultural detritus washes up after the consumer storm that created it has died down. Want to know what was really popular 5-10 years ago? Go to Goodwill. You’ll find plenty of copies of “The DaVinci Code,” George Foreman grills, and Backstreets Boys dolls (not that I’ve looked for the latter). It’s all of the stuff that people wanted when it was new, but get rid of after a few years, when the novelty is gone and they’ve moved on. In a way, I’m a forager, going through the cast-offs of a consumer-based economy, where “more” is always better. This has changed with the economic downturn – as people are no longer just getting rid of perfectly good designer clothing simply because they can – but there are still good things to be found.
I don’t know how I ended up like this. My parents always bought me nice, new things when I was growing up. I never wanted for clothes. As I grew older, I developed a fascination with thrift stores, simply because I enjoyed the mystery of them. I never knew what I was going to find, and I loved that. By the time I met my wife, I was addicted. My wife, however, took my game up a notch, telling me that she never paid more than $5 for a shirt and $10 for a pair of pants. My jaw dropped. How did she do it? Years later, I’ve learned her secrets, and then some. I’ve learned how to clean pretty much any stain out of a garment. I’ve learned that leather is a forgiving material always open to the possibility of a resurrection. I’ve learned how to hem my own trousers, and do my own dry cleaning at home. I’ve learned how to do more with less, because on a journalist’s salary, I don’t have much of a choice.
I’ve got this down to a science. Yesterday morning, I walked into the officer wearing a pair of wool dress pants ($1, church yard sale), a blue dress shirt ($1, church yard sale), a lamb’s wool v-neck Gap sweater ($6, Unique) and my new shoes. I looked like a million bucks, but had spent under $10. The confidence that comes with looking good on a budget, however, is priceless.

Kill the Messenger

Apparently, after all of the reporting on the town hall meetings, the tea party rallies, and anger over Obama’s policies, we in the media still don’t get it.

“Operation: Can You Hear Us Now?” plans to put the media “on trial” Oct. 17. The event (using information found at operationcanyouhearusnow.com) charges that the “defendants (MSM outlets) have been charged with the following misconduct: journalistic malpractice, Yellow Journalism, extreme bias, unfair and unbalanced reporting, reporting that reflects a political agenda, complicity, cover-up and deceit, partnering with Big Government, reporting of self-commissioned polls as “News,” willful misrepresentation of facts, and loss of all objectivity.”

Where do I even start?

First, I find the entire premise of this event to be just the slightest bit political in nature by itself, much like what the “Mainstream Media” is being accused of. Let me see if I get this straight: for eight years of a Republican administration, the media was doing OK? At least to the point where it was the target of a campaign like this? Or does this have more to do that the people who are behind this being more uncomfortable with the state of the world (and the media that reports it) now that Obama and his agenda have taken hold in the White House? As Rush Limbaugh said in September, “The media [are] no longer reporters. They are repeaters.” How is this any different than what happened during the Bush or even the Reagan years? How is this any different than the hook, line and sinker cheerleading that the media fell all over themselves to promote during the run up to the Iraq War? Answer: content.

“Extreme Bias?” This charge comes from an event being reported on by the World Net Daily, one of the most extreme right-wing news sources (Example: today’s headline is “Author confirms Bill Ayers helped Obama write “Dreams.’” This organization is touted as a news source – and the organizers have the nerve to talk about BIAS??

“Partnering with Big Government?” I share the opinion that Obama is a media whore. But as for the charge of complicity (which isn’t outlined any further than the mere statement) there is a difference between reporting on something and actually endorsing it. For example, when the news reports cover a plane crash, they don’t endorse it. They simply call it as they see it. It’s not much different (except for scale and lack of jet fuel) for something like Obama’s bailout plan or the economic downturn. There is a difference in being an observer and being a cheerleader – and the fact that the “The plan” page describes Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, notoriously biased in themselves, both as “American Heros” really undermines the whole “no one should be biased” idea (p.s. – not to nitpick, but whoever wrote this misspelled “heroes”). In this case, it’s simply a matter of wanting another “truth” over what’s actually being presented during the evening news.

“Obviously, the "main stream" media are hard of hearing and seeing. About 2 million mad-as-hell taxpayers assembling in Washington, D.C. for the largest-ever (most well-behaved ever, most respectful ever) protest did not make it onto their radar screens (or our TV screens).” Actually, this is wrong – it WAS covered by the “main stream” media, although obviously not as much as the people behind this event wanted it to be. Also, as far as they “most well behaved, most respectful ever,” are there any police incident reports to back those statements up? Can they be verified? In response to being “ignored,” event organizers want “freedom-loving, American-loving, free-speech loving friends” to go and demonstrate their right to free speech in front of local news outlets (in the Twin Cities, they picked KARE 11). What’s ironic about this concept is that they are basically protesting because they disagree with the content. So let me get this straight – one person’s free speech isn’t as valuable as another? Is that what I’m supposed to take from this?

The idea that media is some liberal bastion of Communist sympathizers is an old one, but I am tired of it. In fact, due to an ever-shrinking amount of organizations and corporations who own media outlets, the ability to ruffle feathers is probably not what it was even 20 years ago. I would imagine media outlets are probably more conservative now than ever before (in terms of oversight and final say), despite what its critics say. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s easy to tar-and-feather the media – but how would it sound if the same people who called Limbaugh and Back “heros” were in charge? Would it be any better? No, it would probably be worse – not because of any lack of ability, but because of the obvious fact that there would still be a bias, albeit one that the “American patriots” planning to protest Oct. 17 are more comfortable with.

One person on the site commented: “I love the idea of taking the battle to them! If, after this, they still ignore our movement, then it will be obvious to the world that they have taken themselves to “fringe” media status. Pravda. We’ll take the ball and run with it from here.” Ignored? How many reports do I have to watch on TV about people prattling on about Obama’s “socialist agenda?” How many more times do I have to hear reports about Obama’s face being decorated with Hitler mustaches at protests? Or see elected officials get shouted down in heated health care town hall meetings? In short, we get it. You are angry. You are upset. But you are most definitely not ignored, despite how persecuted you feel to the contrary.

In the end, this is less about media bias and more about the fact that the people behind this and affiliated with it are fed up (which I can understand, by the way) with the state of affairs as they see it. But to cloak this in the language of some sort of persecuted and ignored sect of society is disingenuous at best, and the fact that they crave the media’s recognition makes me wonder how serious this “trial” is supposed to be.

Leno's new show: more "sit down" than "stand-up"

Well, after all the hype, Jay Leno’s show really isn’t living up to much of it.

I’ve watched most of the episodes this week, and if I were to ask myself for any comment on them, I would say something like, “Ehh, they were OK.” Leno’s last episode of “The Tonight Show” reminded us all why he was so beloved in the first place, and the last bit he did, when he brought out all of the children who had been born to staff while the show was on the air, he ended with the kind of gentle sweetness that separated him from David Letterman in the night time talk world (and in my opinion made him better to watch). 

Leno’s new show, after an entire summer of hyping, premiered Monday night, and featured Jerry Seinfeld, who hosted an awkward and obviously pre-taped interview segment with Oprah Winfrey, which sort of fell flat. Come to think of it, a lot of the non-studio interviews have fallen flat, from Tom Cruise trying desperately to act like a human to Mel Gibson’s creepy, painful and too-long interview from last night’s episode. If you missed it, let’s just say that Mel’s brain has now fully surrendered to madness, and not the charming, quirky kind.

Some of the segments he carried over from the old show, like the bits where he reads headlines or goes over to people’s houses to ask them random things or dress them up to re-enact TV shows or movies, are still funny. A great bit from last night’s show featured Rachel Harris, most recently in “The Hangover,” doing a really funny and biting bit where she redecorated her entire living room with stuff she bartered people for. During that bit, she was like a less cuddly Tina Fey, but just as funny and self-effacing.

Unfortunately, the same standard isn’t applicable to the rest of Leno’s new show. A particular example of this that comes to mind was from last night’s episode, in which actress Drew Barrymore did two laps on a racetrack specially built for the show in a Ford hybrid. The “gags” on this racetrack included cardboard cutouts of Al Gore and streamer cannons. I don’t want to even guess how much NBC paid for the 40,000 square-feet of track for this bit, but it was really, really pointless – in fact, it almost seemed like NBC was creating an unfunny sort of “vulgar display of power” just to demonstrate A) How much money they have behind this show, and B) How far they will go to please a sponsor (Ford). In either case, we lose.

I think NBC made a mistake. Something’s missing from Leno’s show: heart. I think he's going through the motions, and after nearly 20 years on TV, I probably would be at this point, too. Part of what made his original show so successful is attributable to the fact that he was a pick-me-up after the 10 o’clock news, which is nowhere near as funny (except when you make a game of counting KARE 11’s technical errors, of which there seem to have been many lately). Before, he could pick you up in the way a funny guy can, a sort of way of saying, "Yeah, the world's a mess, but some of it can be funny." Now, you get the half-heartedly giggle at half-baked skits just in time to watch the real news that Leno used to skewer.

In my estimate, this show isn’t going to go away anytime soon. But I also think it’s not going to be anywhere near the runaway success NBC was desperately hoping for.

'Reach for the Stars'

Rounding out the weekend news, rapper Kanye West once again proved what a gentleman he is, Brett Favre threw 110 yards in Sunday’s game, and a man who saved millions of lives died. Which one do you think most people are aware of?
I admit, I hadn’t heard of Norman Borlaug until before this weekend, but after I did, I was amazed that I hadn’t before. Simply put, Borlaug developed a hardier type of grain in the 1960s, which possibly saved millions of lives in India and Asia. He was honored with a Nobel Prize in 1970. According to an Associated Press obituary, one of his favorite sayings was “'Reach for the stars. Although you will never touch them, if you reach hard enough, you will find that you get a little 'star dust' on you in the process.” It sounds really, really dorky, especially in this cynical age, to talk about ‘star dust,’ but this man did just exactly that – he touched the stars when his work ended up saving many, many lives.
Admittedly, there is nothing sexy about grain. Even when measured against other forms of produce, grain is the Chevy Cavalier of contenders: it’s reliable and plain, and gets you from A to B without any fuss. But life as we know it would not be possible without it. And in places like India and Asia, where population combined with limited farmland creates a potential starvation bomb, this is even truer.
I hear no keening for Norman Borlaug. Like I said, I hadn’t heard of him before Saturday, a week after he died. But I do find it sad, to ply a common cliché, that more people could recount Brett Favre, an insignificant (in the scope of history) sports player than they could the life of a man whose efforts helped humanity. Even in his 90s, when an average person may have been tempted to slow down, he still worked.
“We still have a large number of miserable, hungry people and this contributes to world instability,” he said in May 2006 at an Asian Development Bank forum in the Philippines. “Human misery is explosive, and you better not forget that.”
Borlaug – it doesn’t roll off the tongue, and his work wasn’t glamorous. But I think we’d all do well to remember someone who contributed so much to the world, even if many people in that world didn’t have a clue who he was.

Keeping up with Moore's Law

It’s amazing how fast things have changed.
My wife and I are planning a garage sale for sometime soon, if we can get our acts together enough to pull it off. What is interesting to me about some of what we’re getting rid of in the process of preparing for this sale was highly desirable less than a decade ago. Things like the Brother fax machine in the back of my wife’s Jeep, which no doubt cost a pretty chunk of change and turned the business world on their ear when they were introduced in the early 1990s. Now, thanks to technological evolution, it’s about as quaint as a typewriter. When I think about it, this era has moved so quickly, in terms of what is defined as the “cutting edge,” that we all struggle to keep up with it.
I can imagine that this is a fairly recent phenomenon: I can’t imagine that cavemen found themselves upgrading rocks every five years to keep pace with technology. No, I imagine that many of humanity’s first inventions (primitive textiles, knives, etc.) had a pretty long shelf life. Even as recently as 150 years ago, I don’t think trappers and hunters were making a huge rush to get rid of the flintlock and percussion cap rifles that served them so well for so long. No, this is a more recent phenomenon, in my opinion.
Progress isn’t a bad thing, necessarily. Progress and technological innovation is what allows me to bring this message to a potential worldwide audience with the push of a button, something unthinkable even 20 years ago. But with progress comes complication – complication like the $3,000 iMac that I probably couldn’t get more than $25 for now. Complications like the digital converter box in my basement that makes it even harder to get a decent television signal. Complications like the millions of tons of consumer waste generate each year in the pursuit of an upgrade.
Yesterday’s gold is today’s garbage. I don’t see this trend stopping anytime soon, but I think, given the economic slowdown, that it will falter in its pace. Have you ever heard of Moore’s Law? Described on a Wikipedia page, “Since the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958, the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has increased exponentially, doubling approximately every two years … This has dramatically increased the usefulness of digital electronics in nearly every segment of the world economy. Moore's law describes this driving force of technological and social change in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.”
In time, I can picture that history books will see this entire age as nothing less than a Second Industrial Revolution, when society and the traditional order of things was turned upside down due to new and rapid advances in technology. It may be comfortable to read about – but living through it is less than satisfactory. As I see it, when things settle again, we’re going to see more machines allowing more people to do more work that used to be done by more people, meaning potentially fewer jobs. After all, why pay for another person when you can enable one worker do the work of 10?
Unlike a computer, I can’t double. Not every two years, not every four years, not ever. What I am is likely, in terms of capacity, all I will ever be. I’ve become less than the sum of my parts, someone whose role in the “driving force of technological and social change” has been limited to sighing as he moves his outdated devices to the garage sale table to be cast on the winds of thrift-shopping fate.

Conservatives: Keep Obama out of the classroom!

During a speech to junior high school students in November 1988, then-President Ronald Reagan exhorted the values of low taxes and the American version of self-government, and told kids about the time he received a letter from a man while he was governor of California:

"I got a letter from a man in San Quentin prison, and from the prison he wrote me the letter to tell me he was in there for burglary. He was a burglar. And he said, ``I just want you to know that if [a gun ban] goes through, here in San Quentin there will be celebrating throughout the day and night by all the burglars who are in prison because'' he said, ``we can watch a house we plan to rob for days. We can learn the habits of the people living in that house, to know when is the best time to go in and be a burglar -- rob it.'' He said, ``The only question we can never answer is: Does the man in that house have a gun in the drawer by his bed?'' He said, ``That's a risk we have to run.'' He said, ``If you tell us in advance they won't have a gun in that drawer by their bed,'' he said, ``the burglars in here will be celebrating forevermore.''

I have no memory of of this particular speech, and neither does the rest of America, apparently, as conservative pundits have been spouting off for days about how this represents Obama's desire to brainwash America's children into wanting socialized medicine and government abortions.

I, for one, think the reaction this planned speech has gotten ("They do this type of thing in North Korea and the former Soviet Union ... very cultish" - Andrea Tantarnos, FOX News) is completely misreading the message. The prepared text of Obama's speech can be found online, and after reading, it, I found that I approved of its basic message of hard work and planning educational goals. I find this a marked contrast to Reagan's speech, with its conservative anthems of low taxes and no gun control. I also find it difficult to believe that a junior high student, as the remarks illustrate, would care enough to ask a question about whether or not "Saturday Night Specials," small, cheap handguns, should be banned. I can almost hear the grandfatherly chuckle in Reagan's response:

"Well, I don't have very much of a quarrel with the very cheap weapon and
so forth that makes it so easy for the wrong people to have a gun. I would like to see us
concentrate on what I described in California: of making sure that anyone who buys a
gun is a responsible citizen and not bent on crime."

Can you imagine what would happen if Obama's speech even contained the word "gun?" Conservatives would be howling for blood, and I can envision countless Americans racking their shotguns just in case Mr. O wants to take them away.

In short, this whole brouhaha is scandalous - not because of what it is, but because of what it isn't. If we've gotten so polarized politically that a president's speech asking children to work hard in school is something worth fighting against, then what is the point? If our two-party system, which it seems to have become, is so hell-bent on tearing the opposition down that everything else, including decency and common sense on both sides, goes by the wayside, then what is the point of even having the system in the first place? Is this endless and pointless political one-upmanship the sort of activity the Founding Fathers had in mind?

Death with a spray can

Standing above the yellow jacket’s nest with a can of Raid in my hand, I towered like an omnipotent god. I had, to paraphrase Robert Oppenheimer’s famous reiteration of the Bhagavad-Gita, “become Death.”
I saw the nest a few weeks ago, after I’d mowed right over it without even knowing it was there. Standing outside talking to the neighbors over the fence, I noticed motion out of the corner of my eye, and turned to see yellow flits in the distance, coming and going out of a hole in the ground. I slowly walked over to within five feet of it, and saw the hole. It was about two inches across, and Yellow Jackets diligently exited and entered, not taking exception to my presence.
I always joke that one of my pet peeves is flying insects. Twenty years ago, they became the bane of my childhood when I stepped on a wasp nest in some loose grass clippings while trying to reach a glider. I looked down and saw wasps crawling up my little legs, stinging and biting me. I screamed, and ran two laps around the house at full speed trying to get away from them. I was terrified of anything that flew for the next 10 years or so, which proved embarrassing, as the simple sight of a bee or hornet near me would cause me to freeze mid-sentence.
Eventually, I grew over my fear, and took great delight in destroying the pests wherever I found them. I would ambush bumblebees with a Super Soaker, and look in amazement at the naked black bug a direct hit would leave behind. Hit with a powerful enough stream, I could blast every hair off their bodies. I would terminate nests with extreme prejudice, taking great delight in my complete superiority over a subspecies. In time, my anger faded, and I stopped delighting in these activities, as I realized that life is something sacred, despite the fact that it can sting you, and that I shouldn’t seek out what I dislike in order to destroy it.
I was almost sad walking up to the yellow jackets’ nest yesterday afternoon. They were, as before, oblivious to my presence. I thought back to a podcast I’d been listening to earlier in the day about General Curtis LeMay, the man who ordered the firebombing of Tokyo during World War II, and how the yellow jackets, like the 100,000 Japanese killed in the first firebombing raid over Tokyo, had no idea that this single visitor was the harbinger of their impending doom.
I came back that night, and emptied the entire can into the hole without ceremony or apology. I’ll dig it up when I get home from work tonight, just to make sure I got it all, and I’m sure I’ll discover dozens, and maybe hundreds, of dead yellow jackets – a sight that used to thrill me, but now, reminds me only that life is fleeting, at times cruel, and that there is always someone bigger that may have plans to stomp or spray you.

Not-Quite-Ready-for-Primetime player

My nine-month old daughter is starting to develop her own sense of humor.
I discovered this a few weeks ago, when, as I was changer her diaper on the changing table, I took the pacifier from her mouth and put it in mine. She was confused for a moment, and then broke into a broad smile and giggled. She thought it was funny – why is Daddy doing something the baby does? – and then she reached up and grabbed it back from me.
It’s strange to think about, but we were all born without a sense of humor. Not that we didn’t develop one in time, of course, but at the moment we came into the world, we probably had what most babies have: a strong cry, minimal reflexes and, in my case, a permanently confused look on my face. None of us came out of the womb knowing anything, let alone what’s funny and what is not. We learn it in time. I’m only realizing this now, as I am seeking a human being develop herself from a little speck in the ultrasound pictures into a beautiful little person.
It makes me consider how my own sense of humor was developed. My first memory of something being truly funny came when I was around 5 years old. The family had just purchased its first VCR, and one of the tapes we had was “Saturday Night Live: The Best of John Belushi,” which we watched many times. I found his extreme physicality and intensity to be hilarious, finding out only years later that it was this same excess that ultimately led to his death from an overdose in 1982.
After this introduction, I was an “SNL” fan, and would watch the old episodes on cable TV with my Dad. As I grew, I became interested in the early 90s cast, with Mike Myers, Dana Carvey, Chris Farley, and Phil Hartman. I watched it, found some of it funny, but always knew in the back of my mind that it didn’t hold a candle to the work of the “Not Ready for Prime Time” players of the show’s early years. In time, Hartman would be murdered, Farley, in an eerie echo of John Belushi, would die of an overdose, and I would walk away from watching SNL for nearly 15 years.
In the late summer and fall of 2008, as my daughter grew closer to being born, my interest in SNL returned with its coverage of the 2008 election, and Tina Fey’s dead-on impersonation of Sarah Palin, which once again showed how powerful a comedic medium this venerable enterprise could be when it measured the pulse of the society it mirrored. I think this one character portrayal did more damage to Sarah Palin’s credibility than all of the gaffes and painfully awkward interviews. After the election, my interest in the show again faded, except for the occasional sketches I would hear about around the coffee maker Monday morning.
Still, I know that when my own daughter is old enough, I will hook up the VCR, dust off the beat-up cover of the Belushi video, and ask, with a twinkle in my eye, “Hey, do you want to watch something funny?”