'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?”

Shoe on the other foot

It’s hard to fit the shoe on the other foot.
It has been very interesting to watch the Internet reaction to mysterious posters of Barack Obama allegedly being posted in some parts of the United States. The poster, for those who haven’t heard, depicts the president in “Joker” make-up from the most recent “Batman” movie over a single word: “Socialism.”
According to an KTLA.com article on posters found in the Los Angeles area, Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable President Earl Ofari Hutchinson is calling the depiction “politically mean spirited and dangerous.”
What is interesting about this scenario is that the magazine Vanity Fair portrayed George W. Bush in the same make-up in 2008, and no one said a word. In fact, I remember far worse being said, some of it by yours-truly, about the 43rd president. I even went so far as to install his head on pictures of Adolf Hitler using Photoshop while pretending to pay attention in my college media classes.
For eight years, it was really easy to point fingers and scream about how bad the president was, how opportunistic and insincere he seemed, and how it seemed that he wanted to lead us down a path to our own destruction. When I cast my ballots Nov. 4, I think I did so in the hopes that it would change something - to present an alternative to the ham-fisted antics of George W. Bush. It was, in retrospect, the high water mark for eight years of bumper stickers reading, “Dissent is patriotic;” eight years of telling the other side how bad their president was doing; eight years of smugly telling ourselves that we could do it better.
Well, it’s our side (if there is such a thing) in the White House now – and it’s been somewhat of an eye-opener to me. One of the nice things about being in the opposition is that you can cast stones but don’t have to deal with the bruises. Is dissent still patriotic when someone you like is in the White House? Now, I find myself trying to explain why Obama did this or that to people who didn’t vote for him. It gives me a sense of what it must have been like for the embattled conservatives who tried to join the student newspaper at St. Cloud State - defending decisions you didn't make, and may not have agreed with, on the principal that the party you supported made them.
Here is the most ironic comparison of all: in a way, I've become what I once despised. On a bright fall day in 2004, when W. flew into St. Cloud for a rally, I was among hundreds of counter-protesters who showed up bright and early to express their displeasure with the 43rd presidents. The event went smoothly, until the conservative spectators who showed up to cheer W. on to another White House victory started to leave the baseball stadium that hosted the event, and crossed paths with the counter-protesters. It was as if you'd mixed baking soda and vinegar: it didn't explode, but it sure simmered. One of the most often-hear remarks I remember that day, thrown at us as an epithet from anonymous W. supporters, was the phrase, "Get a job." It stung. We were there because we cared deeply about the future of our country. Or thought we did, anyway.
Now, as I hear about people protesting health care reform, or demanding that Obama produce a birth certificate that proves he wasn't born in Kenya, I find myself saying the same thing: "Get a job."
It's certainly easier to blame than to try, isn't it?

Fifteen-year-old writes about social media, adults set a-Twitter

At first, I thought this article was some sort of joke from the Onion: “Media execs rocked by 15-year-old's blunt, blistering analysis.”
Unfortunately, it is true. Sadly, sadly true.
The 15-year-old is a Morgan Stanley intern named Matthew Robson. Matthew’s observations on social media and how his peers use it is apparently causing a lot of waves at Morgan Stanley’s European Media Group, according to the British newspaper The Guardian. One executive went so far as to say that Matthew’s work was “one of the clearest and most through-provoking insights we have seen.”
What exactly has these executives buzzing? Matthew’s observations state that teenagers don’t use Twitter, read newspapers, and hate advertisements. Plus, they like free music. While I don’t disagree with the veracity of these opinions, I find it really curious and odd that older people who supposedly know better are giving them such weight. Is it really such a revelation to hear that teenagers don’t like to read newspapers? Or that Twitting via cell phone costs money, and therefore isn’t done?
Except for his opinion that many teenagers have never bought a CD, I don’t think that what Matthew writes about is particularly new, clever, or groundbreaking (see for yourself: www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/jul/13/twitter-teenage-media-habits). What I find very interesting is how the words of a single 15-year-old are being taken as some sorts of revelatory gospel prophesy by media teams who, until a few years ago, dictated how communication was done. Now, with the rise of social media, the game has changed, and like any adults, they are desperate to find out how the mythical teenager communicates. To hear some of the quotes from the executives in the article, you would think they were dealing with gorillas that had been taught sign language:
‘We published it,' said Edward Hill-Wood, executive director of Morgan Stanley's European media team. ‘We've had dozens and dozens of fund managers, and several CEOs, e-mailing and calling all day.' He said the note had generated five or six times more responses than the team's usual research.”
Ultimately, what this goes to show me is that, despite changing times and lifestyles, teenagers remain and mysterious to adults as ever, and adults, being adults, will do nearly anything to get their foot in the door leading to the path of young, aloof coolness.