Urbane renewal.
Saturday, January 3rd, 2009
A year ago February I was getting over the silly-ass trauma of losing the Starbucks right down Highland Avenue from us.
I went out in the fog this morning to discover that the sign was going up on a shiny new one which has been built for our upscale caffeinated pleasure down in what we now call the Trader Joe’s shopping center. Ah, life no longer out of balance…de-koyaanisqatsi-ed.
The old one, I can tell you with some precision, was 0.334123 miles by air, or 0.5 mi by road away from here. The new one is 0.974822 miles by air, or 1.2 mi by road. It is in fact a tiny bit further away as the crow flies than the Little Five Points Starbucks (0.895309 miles by air, yet 1.3 mi by road)…but I can count the number of times I’ve zipped over there with my personal jetpack on the fingers of no hands whatsoever, so the stroll to the new one is quite easy and enjoyable…and you don’t have to cross Ponce.
As I think I said back at the start of 2008, I was really in no way deprived by the departure of the old one (nor would I feel much loss over the collapse of the entire chain) except that it was, as designed, an enjoyable place to stroll into amidst clothing shops and beauty parlors that, to be honest, don’t get much of my business.
I thought maybe the store closing was indicative of the times (and well, yeah, things got a lot rougher for SBUX and damn near every other corporation out there in 2008), and maybe the real tell of where we’re at is the sign that said a Krispy Kreme was going in there disappeared quickly and the exBucks property has been sitting unoccupied the whole year. It still looks exactly like the first photo…down to the signage residue.
And it’s not like we’re Krispy Kreme-deprived…an ancient and venerable one (it’s once semi-burned-out sign offered “erica’s Favorite Doughnuts”) is right down Ponce, next to the AIDS hospice.
So what does it tell us that the Starbucksians are confident enough to open another one round here in the current economic climate? Well, I can tell you that the Midtown Promenade shopping center, with the opening of Trader Joes and the subsequent arrival of Richard’s Variety Store has filled in the small shoporama (long ago the home of a sad Winn-Dixie) nicely and made it (certainly over the holidays) a mobbed-parking-lot kinda place brimming with urban disposable-income-disposing. All they really needed to complete the picture was…well, we’re good now, thanks.
Messages from the CPU.
Sunday, December 28th, 2008
Sometimes it’s nice to know when you’re done…
And…what you should do next. Okay, where’s that envelope?
And sometimes, when you think you’re doing just fine, it’s nice to know when a piece of software thinks you haven’t quite measured up…
Why would I want to discard change? Change is good. Change is what I’m counting on as I breathe the last of 2008.
Planet of the bad special effects.
Sunday, December 7th, 2008
Some Sunday mornings I’m a bit nostalgic. So I give you: the Millennium Falcon landing in WTBS’s West Peachtree studio, circa 1980. Careful study of this frame tells you: 1) I was allowed to play with expensive TV equipment in the middle of the night. 2) I had a large model of the Millennium Falcon…in fact, I was apparently willing to spend some of my meager disposable income on a model kit in my early twenties. 3) Our Grass Valley 1600 switcher really didn’t do that good a chromakey. Oh, and 4) we still had Norelco PC-72 cameras.
What this frame doesn’t show is the blast of “landing exhaust” that came from discharging a fire extinguisher right behind the model. Convincing!
Why, you ask? Bill Tush was interviewing Harrison Ford, and I wanted to do something special.
I do not believe that camera.
Friday, November 14th, 2008
Hm. Okay. I’m thinking you shouldn’t be in the icon design business when your drawing of a video camera has to have the words “video camera” on the side in order to even remotely resemble what any human might call a video camera.
And I don’t even want to know what it’s plugged in to.
At any rate, rest assured, the Atlanta Botanical Garden’s (controversial) parking deck construction site is really, really, really well protected. Restricted! Monitored!
By what, you ask? Uh…
Always listening.
Saturday, November 8th, 2008
I’m going to have to figure out a way to pull back from politics and settle back into my usual vast panoply of micro-obsessions with geeky minutiae, and I will, soon, I promise, but for now consider this paragraph of wisdom:
Obama has continually been asked to defend something that ought to be at democracy’s heart: the importance of talking to as many people as possible in this complicated and wildly diverse society, of listening with the possibility of learning something new, and of speaking with the possibility of persuading or influencing others.
That’s unfortunately about twice the size of a 140-character tweet, but I send its common sense out to you nonetheless.
It’s by William Ayers. Bill Ayers. The real guy behind the caricature concocted by the Republicans in order to try and win the election. The so-called domestic terrorist.
And you know what? Even if you completely disagree with every thing he has done and stands for (and I urge you to at least read the short piece I’ve linked to above (right now their server is slogging a bit) before you jerk your knees in that direction) you have (I assert) to respect that he nailed a key difference between the President-elect and the current office-holder, and, at the least, McCain v.2008 (as opposed to the 2000 model, which seemed to have a better listening subsystem.)
Simple for me: we have to keep listening.
Here’s one more chunk:
The McCain-Palin attacks not only involved guilt by association, they also assumed that one must apply a political litmus test to begin a conversation.
On Oct. 4, Palin described her supporters as those who “see America as the greatest force for good in this world” and as a “beacon of light and hope for others who seek freedom and democracy.” But Obama, she said, “Is not a man who sees America as you see it and how I see America.” In other words, there are “real” Americans — and then there are the rest of us.
In a robust and sophisticated democracy, political leaders—and all of us—ought to seek ways to talk with many people who hold dissenting, or even radical, ideas. Lacking that simple and yet essential capacity to question authority, we might still be burning witches and enslaving our fellow human beings today.
and at the end:
In this time of new beginnings and rising expectations, it is even more urgent that we figure out how to become the people we have been waiting to be.
Something to work on while we’re waiting for January 20th.
A triumph of science over fear.
Friday, November 7th, 2008
No, it’s not a real headline, but it cracks me up in a way that I really can’t explain.
There are more here. I think this gets close to the kind of fake headlines and odd stuff we’d stick to the walls of my college newspaper’s office and laugh at over the sound of Warren Zevon and Jackson Browne late into the night. Nice of them to share. Hee, hee.
And yes, we’ve been celebrating all week. I was out getting milk at the Kroger last night and a carful of kids headed up Ponce joyfully chanting “O-ba-ma! O-ba-ma!” This was Thursday night!
Sometimes a Great Notion.
Monday, November 3rd, 2008
And just like that, we’re past Halloween, through the tissue-paper barrier between October and November, and headed down the chute toward the first Tuesday in November…historically, Election Day.
But for maybe as many as 35% of eligible voters, they’ve been there, and, in many cases, stood in line quite a while before having done that…voted, that is.
That’s heartening, to be sure. But here in Georgia, the potential of early voting still collides with the realities of state law (flatly forbidding early voting on Saturday and on the Monday before the election) and our classic oh-we’re-a-sleepy-southern-state-isn’t-it-cute state government that is now forecasting that, aw, shucks, it might be several days until we get that darn avalanche of ballots counted.
Yeesh.
So Sammy, smart enough to see I could use a distraction along with some exercise, took me up to Northwest Georgia for a nice hike, and I brought my Obama-Biden button along to counteract some of the vibes cast by the dozens of McCain-Palin signs that dot the rural Georgia landscape. The leaves were beautiful, the air was clear, and I’ve returned in a good place to enter my final 40 hours or so of focused, intense concern and active internet monitoring of our Tuesday general election.
And yes, we will, as tradition holds, walk down to the library to cast our ballot…in the morning. If we’re still standing in line as the sun goes down…well, we’ll stand, feeling fortunate that we have the kind of schedule where that can happen. And I’ll make sure the iPhone is fully charged.
One linguistic tic that I’m noticing all over the darn place this campaign…but especially coming out at the beginning of Barack Obama’s carefully-crafted responses, is this notion of…this notion.
It’s this quasi-intellectual way of holding an idea up between two fingers, with apparent scientific detachment mixed with a dash of disdain, moments before you toss it aside as not quite what you want to sign your name to.
“we should overcome this notion of North-South…”
“this notion of the little person going up against the big and powerful…”
“this notion of self- constraint is one that is set out in terms of the ability of the self to be governed by pure practical reason…”
“This notion of punishing people by not talking to them has not worked…”
“But this notion of no coal, I think, is an illusion.”
After I started batting this notion around in my election-soaked brain, I came across this AJR piece that suggests that its use is on the rise precisely because Obama uses it as a rhetorical device: “it may mean that Barack Obama’s speech pattern has gotten into our brains…even those of conservative commentators and reporters – all unawares.”
So be prepared for a post-election boost in notional discourse. Or, perhaps, invest now in “items used in sewing, such as buttons, pins, and hooks”…definition three in my Mac’s New Oxford American Dictionary.
Hope to see you at the Starbucks with your “I voted” sticker on tomorrow.
Big type, big sky.
Monday, October 27th, 2008
A couple of brief farewells to start this week before the election. Famed CBS Designer (his life forever intertwined with the Eye network) Lou Dorfsman died last week, the creator of, no, not the iconic CBS eye logo itself, but so much else that defined the once Columbia Broadcasting System as a serious force in American journalism and American culture.
His obsession with the details—as they fit into a very big picture—could be seen in his Gastrotypographicalassemblage, which was, to put it simply, a really, really big wall of 3d wood type in the CBS cafeteria. This was nothing a CBS viewer ever saw on the air—yet for Lou, it had to be crafted with meticulous care and style.
Big (BIG!) type, used boldly, distinctively, confidently—that was Dorfsman all over. I was, of course, inspired by him and his work.
And much further west, we say goodbye to Tony Hillerman, born in Oklahoma, moved to go to school in New Mexico, and there around the Four Corners is where he spent most of his life, amidst great visual beauty and immersed in the ancient culture of native Americans…and their very modern poverty and marginalization.
He was able to bring to life realistic stories of Navajo detectives on tribal land…and in some ways, he brought the sights and smells of the land itself to life in books like “Skinwalkers” and “The Blessing Way.” His attention to telling detail in the written word, and spare, yet evocative word-painting earned my respect from the first words of his I read.
One of my enduring memories is traveling New Mexico with Ms. Sam, heading up to Canyon de Chelly, surrounded by stunning vistas, while reading a Hillerman paperback and listening to the soft discordant melodies of Navajo speech come out of the radio. It almost seemed like random tonalities…until the announcer read the phone number and said the word “brake repair” in English.
Tweets of change.
Sunday, October 26th, 2008
From Twitter on this sunday fall afternoon, the sounds of change, 140 characters at a time:
Just got a call from my Mom in Denver. She is seeing Barack Obama speak today!
100,000 gather in Denver for Barack Obama rally. My sons called it “life-changing.”
Everything is bigger out west. Over 100,000 at obama’s rally in Denver today! 38 minutes ago
Reading that Obama spoke to a crowd of 100,000 today in Denver. McCain spoke to a crowd of less than 1,000.
Had a great time at the big Obama rally in Denver. No problem getting there – bus from boulder. Saw him from the steps of the capitol.
Over 100K at rally for Obama in Denver today. Seems like a lot of people are paying attention to this election and not just randomly voting.
fortunate enough to meet Barack Obama last night. What an inspiration.
Denver Post says there were 100k at the Obama rally. It was an impressive site and I’ll post the pictures when I get back to my mac.
100K at Denver Obama Rally. Denver, you rock. I’m feeling idealism coming back again.
Meanwhile, make no mistake, there are plenty of tweets out there that link the Democratic nominee to the holocaust, nazis, communists, Timothy McVeigh, Karl Marx, and anything else they can think of to generate fear.
Fear. Of a man running for president. That’s the sole tactic now.
It’s really amazing. And on such a beautiful fall day. Would have like to have seen that crowd in Denver in person (and in Indianapolis—Indy! last week)…but the 140-character-bursts-of-optimism will do.
One Colorado blogger reported “More than half of the crowd raised their hands in the affirmative to the question of whether they have voted yet. That’s inspiring, too! All in all, it was a somewhat effortless voyage into a considerably positive event. It was strong. It was intensely good. It was beautiful.”
Inspiration versus fear. There ya go.
Through Ohio, headed South.
Sunday, October 26th, 2008
Hey there, we made it home last week, and that feels good. The dumpster is out of our driveway. 99.5% of our house reconstruction is done, and we’ve returned from a journey north to see family and friends, to put The Green Cottage to sleep for the winter, to enjoy the leaves changes through bright shades of maple-red and sycamore-gold.
A meeting with a new client of mine gave us a chance to swing wide through Ohio and wander down through West Virginia on our way back south, and because this is the political season as much as it is autumn, it gave me a chance to—in a fairly non substantive way—get back in touch with my roots and get a sense of how the midwest is faring economically (mmm…not well) as well as get the faintest read on the political landscape—by watching the political signs as they literally dot the countryside.
In Michigan and Ohio, the yard signs were out in force, and I was heartened to see Obama signs in places that were traditionally considered Republican strongholds. Sammy, ever-attuned to the nuances of the landscape, pointed out the difference between yard signs…the ones that you put on your own property and the ones that appear on the edge of public right-of-ways that can be scattered by political operatives and volunteers. We saw both in the upper peninsula of Michigan and the farm country of northwest Ohio. South of Youngstown, down to the Ohio River, where my mom grew up (on the West Virginia side) we saw more democratic signs, and a lot of them tied into the unions—still a force after all the closings and all the layoffs and all the 1980s.
We got as far as just south of Parkersburg, West Virginia for the night, and I had a good chance to watch the political ads for three states there, and Obama dominated the airwaves, along with spots that used Joe Biden in a way to, frankly, say to folks in these parts “I know this Obama guy, and he’s not a scary guy.”
Biden has been doing some very heavy lifting for the campaign, including a series of satellite TV interviews with local anchors—one, for a TV station in Orlando was just beyond my belief. Longtime anchor Barbara West apparently wanted to pose nothing but questions crafted by those somewhere way, way to the right of Rush Limbaugh. “You may recognize this famous quote, ‘from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.’ That’s from Karl Marx. How is Sen. Obama not being a Marxist if he intends to spread the wealth around?” Biden: “Are you joking? Is this a joke? … Or is that a real question?” Was Obama trying to “turn America into a Socialist country like Sweden?” Biden said, “I don’t know anybody who thinks that except the far right-wing of the Republican Party.” I watched and shook my head…this is exactly why so much of local television news is ridiculed, ignored, increasingly irrelevant. Biden handled it with sophistication and intelligence. Any questions about jobs, the economy, our future? Social security? Um…no.
As we drove south of Charleston, West Virginia and down through Pikeville, Kentucky and hard-core coal country, the political signs seemed to disappear completely…and yet I’ve found no laws that prohibit them. Maybe folks are just feeling more disenfranchised there. We dropped down through western Virginia (yes, the real Virginia) and they picked back up again, and again I was heartened to see the Obama name scattered through the political sign-forest. That was less true back in our own red state, at least up in the mountains, but then we got back to our latte-sipping, Prius-loving neighborhood, and we were awash in Obama-hope. And, home.
My summer ‘vacation.’
Monday, September 22nd, 2008
Rebuild the house? Check. Do a new logo, animation, and station design for some nice people in Portland?
Check.
By the way, the KOIN Local 6 package was delivered completely online…no tape whatsoever…and was the first that I could watch premiere live from across the country, streaming from their website. Nice.
Oh, and I put a few more images up here.
Back to you.
Thursday, September 18th, 2008
A fellow Postie—that is, of course, someone who worked at the Ohio University Post in Athens in the olden days—made a cogent observation about the Republican ticket:
“Think of all the newscasts that feature the avuncular old pro who’s been at the station for years, teamed with the youthful, attractive female anchor,” said P.J. Bednarski. executive editor of Broadcasting & Cable, as brought to my attention by Chicago Sun-Times media columnist Robert Feder.
“He’s the cranky, old salt who tells it like it is and jokes he can’t figure out that ‘My Friendbook,’ let alone work that damn newfangled fax machine. She’s the breath of fresh air who humors the old coot and draws in the women and younger demos.
“My intention, of course, is not to demean female anchors or older male anchors; the May-December anchor formula is well known. He teaches; she learns.”
Well, exactly, Peej. And that adds a new level of understanding about what’s inspired the McCain TV spots post-convention. Think “news promos.” Maverickwitness news. A lack of substance and veracity…you can count on.
By the way, the photo above is of the troubled Philadelphia May-December (former) anchor team of Larry Mendte and Alycia Lane…you may remember her altercation with the city of New York and his criminal actions that started with reading her email and went further into bizarroland. Not implying that the Republican ticket will have problems like that…they’ll probably have other equally bizarre and entertaining problems.
Doing battle with language.
Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008
I’m all for the power of metaphor, but it seems like the folks who write plain old everyday news copy have learned somewhere to “enhance” their work by casting every news event in the terms of a battle, a struggle, a clash, a fight.
Barack Obama “takes it to” John McCain, “pummeling” him in his acceptance speech. Really? I heard a speech full of optimism, idealism, and hope. Democrats “ripped into” John McCain. I hope they didn’t spill anything vital…his VP pick scares me enough as it is. McCain’s been busy “ripping” Putin, Bush, Romney, Clinton, Obama…jeez, the guy must be stopped!
The Clintons “threw a one-two punch” against McCain. Biden, it’s said, gives McCain, a “blue collar punch in the mouth.” The taste of denim? And Biden’s been bashed, and he bashes right back, and I don’t mean a fancy-dress cocktail-party bash, either.
Throughout the debates, the candidates were said to “batter” each other, to “strike first,” to “take shots at,” to “blast”…what’s all this damn blasting? There are “sucker punches.” Someone is hitting someone else “below the belt.” Everyone apparently sanctions “attack ads.” One site asks breathlessly: will Hillary attack Sarah Palin? I think the Alaska governor is now getting Secret Service protection, so that would probably be thwarted. A disgruntled caribou might make some headway, though.
How can anyone from any party have a substantive political discussion amist all this language distortion?
But it’s not just politics. Hurricanes are personified as malevolent, sentient forces, “taking aim” at this coast or that, swerving, feinting, and again with the pummeling and battering. Tropical storm Ike “lurks” just behind Hanna.
It makes me think that the policy of naming tropical storms and hurricanes is a bad idea. Let’s call Hanna “Storm B329X5,” and see how scary it sounds.
Would news writers’ lives become that much more boring if they, uh, merely used words like “said,” “claimed,” “announced,” “charged,” and maybe even “challenged”? Those are words that could bring what’s really going on into sharper focus. It might not make for as compelling a banner at the bottom of the screen, but it might make for a less bruised body politic.
The new Segrettis.
Wednesday, August 27th, 2008
Someone I know who listens to way too much Rush Limbaugh forwarded me a collection of jokes the other day that was topped with some sort of godawful cartoon that tried yet again to play on the Obama/bin Laden muslim crap thing that I would have thought anyone with half a brain would have tossed aside back in, oh, February.
So I wrote him and said “Please do NOT send me any more of this crap.”
So he sends me this today:
Subject: Fwd: Fw: THIS ONE WILL REALLY SHOCK YOU!!!!!!!
John;
An old friend of mine who is a VERY GOOD news guy (and LIKES OBAMA) sent this to me. Please take a look in your spare time and tell me why BLACK people are after him now? This is not an argument on my side, just strangeness to me.
It had been forwarded about 6 times previous to my getting it.
So here’s what I wrote back:
I read Barack Obama’s book “The Audacity of Hope” cover to cover. He’s a smart guy. That’s pretty much case closed for me…he’s the smartest guy in the room, and Biden’s right up there. I vote for guys (or women) who can outthink me without breaking a sweat. McCain doesn’t pass that test.
I really don’t think it’s fair to say “BLACK people are after him now.” he’s just a person. [someone we both know] is NOT after him–a black guy! [another guy we both know] is not after him–a white guy! You can be damn sure that the Karl Rove associates McCain has hired to smear Obama are paying for as much of this crap as they can (hey, way cheaper than TV spots), and they count on well-meaning folks like you to forward it. Don’t play their game.
You’re just doing the McCain campaign’s dirty work by forwarding crap like this…they LITERALLY want exactly what you did to happen over and over again. Their cost? Free. They’re chuckling at how easy it is to put stuff out in a world pre-jaded by the likes of Limbaugh and O’Reilly.
We’re all just “guys”…Barack’s race (which is what, exactly?) is meaningless to me, mostly because we’re all just DNA mixed cocktails anyway. His upbringing is certainly something I identify with more than McCain’s.
Youall have to take a deep breath and realize we need a leader to get us 1) out of our current mess and 2) make our country again worthy of respect around the world. (No, we’re not respected now. Feared maybe. I don’t want to be feared.)
I’m going with Obama.
–jcb
Folks are seemingly oblivious to what extent this machine of destruction has been embedded into American culture, and the internet is just the perfect—almost infinitely cheap—medium for this kind of stuff to propogate. Back in 1972, Donald Segretti and the rest of Nixon’s dirty tricks squad had to work a lot harder to get a meme of evil to extend its tendrils through society. These days, a click or two, and you’re done.
And you know why it works…in some ways, it’s the classic social thing: “I really didn’t want to receive that kind of junk, but I didn’t want to offend him by telling him I was upset.”
Don’t break the chain, in other words. We’re all so polite. It’s time to, instead of simply hitting the delete button or tuning out in a cocktail party conversation, to speak up for what you (and I) believe at your core.
This verminous smear campaign only stays alive if we keep quiet. Are you voting for Obama? Glad to hear it.
Tell your friends why, and what you believe in. And stand by your words.
Unevolved.
Sunday, August 24th, 2008
I’ve gotta stop reading the newspaper..er..the web as a way to spin down after working late into the night. I look up and it’s 2:30. I think about blogging about what I’ve read, and it’s 3. Now, it’s 4.
I had another one of those moments, here, in mid-night, where I had to shake my head not in a casual “tsk, tsk” kind of way but in a bigger, more brain-throbbing, “nooo….this simply can’t still be like this in 2008″ kind of way. But in my frustration, there are growing rays of hope, worth writing about.
Read (and read all of) A Teacher on the Front Line as Faith and Science Clash by Amy Harmon in the New York Times…about today’s challenges of teaching evolution in the Bible belt. That phrase, by the way, appears nowhere in the article, but I’ve lived down here long enough to feel its presence, tightly squeezing the minds of now several generations of youngsters into a contrived vision of the Earth as a giant playset, arranged just so by…well, by God over the last 10,000 years, tops.
The piece hangs its hook on the positive news that there is a fading resistance to teaching evolution as, well, the proven science that it is. Florida, Harmon reports, is just one of the states which has drafted new standards for the teaching of and testing on the scientific (theory of) evolution. (That parenthetical, inserted in the state’s language, to appease the folks who are still back there in 1925.) They’re drafting standards I think as much from fear of litigation as much as fear of humiliation in the greater community of humankind.
So read about a Florida teacher, David Campbell, representative of those who try to reach the unreachable, who gently offer science straight-up, not with contempt but with a compassion that matches the words (if not deeds) of their Christian charges. They are (and I don’t use this term casually) modern heroes to me…I can’t imagine anything much more challenging in the arena of modern education. They have to deliver information with an coaxing approach that allays unreasonable fear and makes it all right to begin to see a broader, more logical, more scientific world view, outside the doctrinaire confines of the family Bible.
These educators have to face almost incomprehensible ignorance, day after day. And contempt and tuning-out too, of course.
How did we get to this point? We’re decades after I was taught evolution as “no big deal”—as established science…decades after we looked at the Scopes trial as a sepia-toned snapshot of how far we’ve come…and chuckled at the backward attitudes that (I was sure, back in grade school) would be as extinct as the mammoth in a very short time.
It’s as if we’ve generationally backslid, and we’re only now slowly getting back to the quality of understanding that was prevalent in the early 1960s. We’ll be able to figure out how to put a man on the moon (again), soon.
Take a close, close look at the photo at the top of the article, which somehow manages to encapsulate the fear, skepticism, and just plain ignorance that these caring teachers face. The boy in the center is quoted in the article as saying “there’s no way I came from an ape,” as if that’s the big takeaway from an understanding of vast but minute biological changes over almost immeasurable time.
Yet the photo somehow conveys the magic of education at work. There’s the surface skepticism—the bred-in contempt the students have for the scientific method is on the tips of their tongues…but they are listening. They are engaged. They’re just the tiniest bit open to the possibility of learning, growth, change.
And I was delighted to discover one hopeful footnote in the comments attached to the article. One of David Campbell’s former students seems to have emerged into a more examinable, thoughtful world:
Bless Mr. Campbell. He was my high school biology teacher, and this article only begins to illustrate all the ways in which he is an amazing teacher. He constantly challenges his students to think for themselves, to analyze, and to test hypotheses rather than simply accept things at face value. He was the first teacher who ever taught me how, not what, to think, and Mr. Campbell is the reason I am now a biologist, studying evolutionary biology. Thank you, Mr. Campbell, and all biology teachers like you, who, in teaching evolution well, nurture the natural curiosity in young minds.
Thanks to the hard work of (at least) one diligent, engaging teacher, 21st century American public school biological education is…an evolving situation.
Whose headlines these are…
Wednesday, August 20th, 2008
Sometimes, latenight when I should be actually working, I divert myself with one of the web’s oldest aggregation sites. Slashdot is a festival of “news for nerds, stuff that matters,” and at least some of it emerges from a small town near Ann Arbor Michigan, so Sammy would tell you it can’t be all bad.
So tonight, the headlines are pouring into my sleep-deprived eyeballs, and they read like so much bad tech poetry:
Japan Demands Probe of iPod Nano Flameouts
Flash Ads Launching Clipboard Hijack Attacks
Judge Rules Man Cannot Be Forced To Decrypt HD
MIT Students’ Gag Order Lifted
Teens Arrested For Motorized Office Chair
…I took the road less traveled by flaming Nanos and Motorized Office Chairs, and that has made all the difference.
