FB Diet Ambivalence

For the past several months I've been off Facebook, mostly.  I haven't officially left, and I still wish folks a happy birthday (I get email reminders for that, which I value--I'd never remember otherwise), and on those occasions I visit, I strew "likes" and "loves" as liberally as ever, but I don't post, I've removed the apps from my phone and iPad, and I've un-liked and un-followed people and organizations even remotely political.

This has pluses and minuses, of course.  On the plus side, I no longer daily slide into a dark spiral, spurred by someone's posting of bad social or political news (or my perusal of the adjacent comments section).

(I have to say this does happen whenever I visit, though.  Even in my pared-down FB world, folks post political-social stuff, and other folks say mean, stupid, ignorant stuff.  And I just never get over my dismay at meanness, stupidity, and ignorance.)

Also on the plus side, I avoid a lot of advertising I don't need to see, I spend less time on a lot of trivial crap, and (related) I don't sit around wondering why more folks don't "like" or respond to my posts.

On the minus side, I feel somewhat less connected to friends and family.  I miss sharing special experiences on FB and miss the feeling of knowing at least where folks are  by what they are posting on FB. 

I am hoping to do more reaching out to folks individually (with letters and postcards, imagine that!) and writing more here to share special experiences, and doing more of my own creative work in general.  That is always an ambition, but not so easily realized.  We'll see.

I also feel like I miss part of the zeitgeist--what folks are thinking and talking about, what's interesting, what's funny. 

For example, today I went on FB (to wish someone a happy birthday, natch), and a distant friend posted a link to this excellent Pixar video, which I am so glad I saw. A member of a cooking interest group I belong to posted a link to this fabulous interview with Samrit Nosrat.  The interview reminds me of why I was so crazy about her book and love her whole personality.

So by avoiding FB, I also avoid this kind of stuff.  On the other hand, I've been sitting at my desk for more than an hour and haven't gotten any work done, so maybe it's really best to keep my FB interaction to very small doses.

Substitution in Thinking about Activists

There is something so very wrong when college students are subject to racial epithets and ugly vandalism and nothing is done, as has happened at Missouri State University. Now, because the football team decided to strike, there are at least some administrative changes in the offing, but there is still not much clarity around how the racist behavior at the root of current events will be addressed. 

And when the protesting students make (perhaps) a misjudgment (the refusal to tolerate a media photographer at their tent city on campus), the world rushes to condemn them.

As if pushing one reporter away outweighs addressing any harm the students have suffered and will suffer due to entrenched racism in the university community.

I suppose it is because racism makes us so uncomfortable. We much prefer to believe it doesn’t exist, or if it does, then it isn’t our responsibility to fix. 

The other night I was glued to Twitter, reading a conversation between Roxane Gay (who recently spoke at the Humanities Festival here in Chicago) her friend, sociologist Dr. Tressie Cottom, and David Simon, the former journalist who created the great television series The Wire and Treme. David Simon was arguing for absolute freedom of the press, criticizing the protestors for barring access to photographer Tim Tai. Gay and Cottom were making a more nuanced argument, accounting for the protesters’ wariness of media and their desire to foster a safe space.

What stunned me most was how much Twitter energy was going into arguing over this incident—one viral video. This was more worth discussing than how we fix the real problems that those protesters are facing? Tim Tai himself tweeted, “Just want to reiterate that while I think we need to talk about the 1st Am issues from today, the larger story is not about that.”

Yet The Twitter conversation went on! I was deeply disappointed in David Simon, although this discussion has been proposed as an example of a useful debate on Twitter.

Can we have multiple conversations (e.g., about racism and about the importance of the first amendment)? It seems like we ought to be able to. But when one conversation is difficult, we tend to supplant the difficult conversation with the easier one. And if the easier one involves switching blame to the victims we might be complicit in harming, so much the better.

We not only get to avoid the difficult conversation, but we get to weasel out of our responsibility to fix the root problem. It’s like focusing on a rape victim’s tacky fashion sense, or—even more typically—focusing on the shoplifting activity of an unarmed teen killed by police.

I don’t know what stops this. Per Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow), answering an easier question when we’re asked a hard one is something we just do. Recognizing that we do it is one step forward, but only the first.

P.S. Good article by Roxane Gay on student activism here.

Going Digital

I have never been as attracted to books as objects so much as for what they contain. Those who know me might raise their eyebrows at this--I have an awful lot of books. But I have rarely minded cheap editions or used ones; as long as a book was readable, I'd be happy enough to own it.

Of course, some books are attractive primarily because of their physical aspect: my Abrams art book on collage, with its tipped-in pictures and two-color letterpress printing; the book about the Peacock Room that I am reading now. And some books are really more convenient and useful in their analog state--like travel guidebooks and field guides, so you can flip through when you don't know what you're looking for.

Sitting in my living room lately, with its wall of books, I've been fantasizing about empty space. The advantage of books on the shelf is the visual sweep--there's a randomness factor: running your thumb along the spines you might choose to read a book you didn't intend to at first. There's a similar loss in the exchange (years ago accomplished) of digital music for CDs, but that loss is compensated somewhat by software "shuffle" features. Browsing is also still possible in digital book collections; it just becomes a conscious choice rather than a default activity. Web services like Library Thing can display book collections in multiple formats.

Slogans against digital books point out "books don't need batteries" but the physical space required by books is not trivial (says one who has lined the walls of two rooms with them). And this far-from-trivial space has very limited value beyond what it contains. It does provide a kind of eccentric eye candy and a visual reminder of what one has read and has yet to read. For the most part, though, the books are bound and printed cheaply, not made to last, and the spines fade on the shelf. The loyalty to what one has read and what one wants (or wanted at one time) to have read...sometimes it seems silly.

So find myself wishing that much of my library were digitized. As I read Wolf Hall on my Kindle last week, I had absolutely no nostalgia for turning paper pages, or lugging around a big fat tome. I was enthralled by the novel, and didn't need yellowing paper to enhance that enchantment.

It's quite impossible to contemplate buying digital copies of all my books. It would cost something around $30K (assuming ,$9.99 a book for 3,000 books). Of course, some I wouldn't want digitized, and some are not available.

It turns out that there are devices to transform real books to e-book files, and I even found a service. The devices are either really expensive or require you to turn the pages (and sometimes both)--imagine doing this for 3,000 books! Ugh. The service might be worthwhile, at least for some books not available on Kindle (they won't do a Kindle conversion for books already commercially available on ereaders, though you could get PDFs).

For now I am lightly thinning the shelves by replacing hard copies with digital versions of free or cheaply available classics by the likes of Dickens and Wharton. I have established a moratorium on buying new paper books unless they are unavailable for Kindle, or they really are better in paper (cookbooks are another example).

My library's digital conversion will happen in fits and starts, and will not be complete, but it is happening.

Someone I Used to Know

I am reading a novel by someone I used to know.  Not very well; Diana was a grad student when I was an undergrad: I admired her from afar.  She was tall, blond, slim, and (to me) grownup and glamorous.  Her boyfriend--just as tall, slim, and handsome--was he a grad student in a different department?--added to the glamor.

She was the first person I ever saw wear black stirrup pants.  I remember asking her where she got them, and her bemusement at my admiration. Black stirrup pants became my uniform (under a white dress shirt) for at least a handful of years. (My husband periodically evinces nostalgia for them: "You used to always wear stirrup pants. What happened?") I remember mean-spirited voices criticizing her work as beautiful, but too opaque, difficult.  She is probably the person I most wanted to be when I was 19 or 20.

I never did become her, though. Never that slim, nor that alluring, and nobody ever accused me of opacity (quite the opposite).

But I became her reader, and happily find her work engaging, actually wholly delightful.

A Slight Complaint

I have nothing to complain about, really. It's silly. But I will anyway: why does everything happen at the same time? During the Chicago Humanities Festival, I'm typically completely booked--how can you miss stuff like John Hodgman, or the Guerrilla Girls, or Robert Reich, or Irene Pepperberg, or Lynda Barry? Tonight, for example, I'm going to see Dave Frishberg, who I adore.

But this same evening, Jaume Plensa, who designed and created the Crown Fountain in Millennium Park, will be talking about public art at the Art Institute's Rubloff Auditorium, free. And all through these CHF weeks, there have been intriguing, though unrelated, programs--Margaret Atwood reading from her new book, backed up by a chorus. Science lectures, talks on Lincoln, readings by an array of novelists, a Parks Department meeting requesting public input on what should be done with Northerly Island. Why do they schedule everything at the same time?

OK, end of complaint. Really, I couldn't be happier. And Victor would probably explode, or collapse, or something if I dragged him to one more event.

Irony

Victor and I went to see Jonathan Lear speak on irony at the Chicago Humanities Festival in Hyde Park last month. Lear is a philosophy professor at the University of Chicago who has made irony into a specialty.

It's a pleasure to listen to a really thoughtful person. Jonathan Lear reminded me that philosophers are concerned not just with ideas, but how ideas can fuel a good (or better) life. In his discussion of irony, Lear started with a dictionary definition, which I thought an unworthy sort of straw man, but as his argument developed, I appreciated the simplistic beginning. Lear argues that the ironic stance is far from unserious; the ironist may be absolutely earnest in his quest for genuine meaning. The ironist observes that in a roomful of "Christians" there is not a single true Christian; that in a hospital ostensibly devoted to the care of the sick, there are no real healers, that in the world's greatest democracy only a minority of citizens regularly vote.

It has often been said that we live in an age of irony; the ironic stance is seen as hip, perhaps, but lacking in substance. Certainly the ironist is seen as the opposite of sincere (after all, the dictionary definition insists that irony involves saying the opposite of what you mean). On the contrary, Lear argues that the ironist is the one who feels most deeply: unable to bear hypocrisy, he exposes it with assertions designed to make others as uncomfortable as he already is. Lear sees the moment of ironic recognition (for example, the moment the teacher realizes that all this effort he expends in grading papers really has nothing to do with students' learning) as a profound one; potentially the first step we can take toward living a more authentic life.

It is important, of course, not to get stuck in the ironic moment, but to figure out, once you recognize the fake, how to generate the real--how to be a real teacher, citizen, etc. Because when we call out something as fake, we implicitly acknowledge that the real thing exists. Somewhere, somehow.

So, in a way, ironists are actually romantics, in love with ideals. Disappointed romantics, perhaps, but also earnest romantics. (Things always contain their opposites.)

Why Facebook?

I find myself repeatedly trying to articulate to others why I'm finding my first couple of weeks on Facebook so enthralling. I've decided that Facebook's genius is in virtualizing trivial communication--the kind of chat that happens when you see someone every day.

"I dreamed last night that everyone in the world sent me a french fry."

"On my long haul to the Bronx I get a lot of reading done. Now I am reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies."

"I almost fell down the stairs while looking at my iPhone with my reading glasses on. The dog looked away."

These are approximations of actual posts by friends I rarely see, or haven't seen in 20 years or more (OUCH!), but which make me feel they are still part of my life, even though they are not physically present.

These are folks with whom I'm unable to sustain an email relationship--either they don't write, I don't write, or there's not really enough to say. But if our life circumstances were different (still living in the same city, working in the same office, going to the same classes, not consumed by work, children, or other passions), we'd still be hanging out.

I've also rekindled a couple close friendships via Facebook, but find myself inclined to pursue those outside of Facebook. Email and phone calls are more appropriate for deep conversations and reminiscing. But for a virtual sense of community, virtual water cooler, or virtual corner cafe or bar, Facebook is consummately effective.

Reading on My iPhone

So I recently got an iPhone, which I'm satisfied really is the greatest thing since sliced bread. What's the greatest part? Oh, it's hard to choose: surfing the Web on a street corner, to find out whether the restaurant I'm thinking about going to is any good; using built-in GPS to make sure I'm walking in the right direction; being able to instantly find out whether my bus will arrive within the next 10 minutes; having access to my complete calendar wherever I go...let alone email and telephone functionality. It's like a tricorder on Star Trek (which seems to do just about everything), combined with a communicator, but it's real! And it's cool!

Plus, I can read books on it. So far, I have read HG Wells' The Time Machine and am in the middle of The Jungle Book. Reading on the iPhone is easy and fun (some of the reader applications have page-turning visuals and even sound effects), and best of all I don't have to carry an extra book around. If you know me, you know I love books, but the convenience of this device is just amazing. When I think of the pain in the butt it was to haul War and Peace around...

Also, am crazy about iBird Pro, a field guide app. Not only does it eliminate the need to lug a field guide along when birdwatching, but it plays bird calls. Totally cool!

Anyhow, I'm just enchanted with my new device. A bit too addicted to the Scrabble app, though...

All right, all right, I've joined Facebook...

And it is really distracting.

Bye, Bye Dopplr

Sometimes social media seems cool, but is pretty pointless. Example: Dopplr.com, a "social atlas." Travelers post their upcoming trips and make their journeys visible to other travelers they choose. The site also contains a crowd-sourced travel guide for user destinations.

Someone sent me a link for this recently, and it sounded cool, so I joined. I even passed the link on to a couple of other people. But after an email reminder led me to populate my account with some travel data today, I realized I anticipated no benefit from the investment of time and effort. I know where I'm going, and the people I know who care about where I'm going also know where I'm going (or else I don't want them to know).

A key function of Dopplr is to point out "coincidences"; e.g., "1250 people are going to NYC at the same time as you." Perhaps I'm unusual, or maybe it's a generational thing, but I'm just not that interested in such coincidences. No doubt, many thousands of people are going to NYC at the same time as me--I'll see some of them at the airport when I arrive. Why should I be curious about the travel habits of Dopplr members I don't know?

It might be sort of cool if everyone I ever met was on Dopplr and let me see their schedules--wow, that girl who sat across from me in French class (and nearly failed) is going to Paris! Or, OMG, my ex-boyfriend is vacationing in Orlando at the same time as I am! That sort of critical mass is probably the inherent attraction of something like Facebook.

But then, I don't have a Facebook account, either.

I do have a TripAdvisor account. Occasionally I write reviews of hotels I've stayed in; more often I read the reviews. And I minimally keep track of my travel there, because the site provides a truly cool bonus for populating my travel data--a Travel Map, with pushpins indicating the places I've been.

And this is perhaps a critical difference between Dopplr.com and social media that I do (at least occasionally) use: without its social component, Dopplr serves no purpose at all. I don't need a website to keep track of my upcoming trips: I already do that using my calendar. I don't need Dopplr for travel advice: there are plenty of crowd-sourced travel guides.

I visit my account at LibraryThing not because I'm dying to know what thousands of strangers have on their shelves, but because it provides a useful tool to catalog my books.

Maybe I'm not hip enough. Regardless, this afternoon I closed my Dopplr account. Life's too short.

Painting Class

Taking an art class as an adult feels funny. It's like kindergarten all over again: you wear a smock, make messes, cover your hands and forearms with multicolored streaks. It brings back memories: how it always seemed impossible to get the paintbrush clean just by swirling it in a cup of water.

Now I do manage to get the brush clean, but I remain pretty inept at things like circles and straight lines.

Today's class was about colors--we mixed primary colors with each other in different percentages to make a color triangle and mixed primary colors with complementary colors in different percentages to make earthier tones. Cool! But I definitely felt kindergartenish--using my finger would have worked better and been a lot more satisfying than mixing globs of paint on my palette with a knife.

April Showers, Chicago Style

It's been a pretty cold, wet spring, and everybody's complaining about it. I don't know how many times I've heard people say that Chicago doesn't have a spring; just (beautiful) fall, (brutal) winter, and (beatific) summer.

It isn't true. Chicago absolutely does have a spring, but those of us who've lived in warmer climes just expect it to start sooner and be milder. Since March began, we've rarely had snow (and snow sometimes in spring is only to be expected--think of Yukio Mishima's Spring Snow) and temperatures have rarely--if ever--descended into the 20s. Crocuses and daffodils started to appear in March; migratory birds have been passing through since late February.

The tremendously rainy, chilly April has demoralized everyone, but rain in April is hardly out of place.

(Don't make me repeat that old rhyme.)

I'm no particular fan of freezing or searing temperatures, but I really enjoy having four seasons. There are so many ways we lose touch with the outdoors; changes in weather remind us that we are subject to something beyond our own little plans. In winter, I make a point of watching for wintering ducks, and tracking how the harbor freezes and thaws. We stay home a lot more, but our lives are usually so outward-focused that it feels kind of like vacation. We rent a lot more DVDs and cook heartier meals.

In spite of the damp chill of the current spring, I've been delighted with the new flowers, the trees just beginning to bud and leaf out, the determined (and euphoric) singing of birds, and spotting species I haven't seen since before winter began. In the harbor, on the lake, and in nearby ponds I've noticed ducks and geese pairing up. In the parks, red-winged blackbirds have been extremely vocal about their territories.

So what if it's been cloudy and gray?

The sun will return in good time.

Technology and Me

Recently, someone said to me, "When I was in grad school, there was no Internet, that's how old I am." Well, when I was in grad school, the Internet existed, but it didn't do very much. "I had to type my dissertation on special paper." I printed my thesis out using a dot-matrix printer.

In 1981, I was 16 years old, and still writing term papers out by hand. Even at Queens College, most of my instructors allowed assignments to be handwritten. When I started working for temp agencies that year, I was limited to straight receptionist and filing jobs because I was utterly hopeless with a typewriter. After a few years at SUNY-Binghamton, though, I became pretty proficient with my Smith-Corona--so much so that I periodically had to take it into a repair shop to get key covers replaced--(I was more of a POUND typist than a TOUCH typist--still am).

I remember browsing Macy's while I was in college. Apple computers were on display, selling for around $2,000, maybe even more. They looked so cute! Those little screens. That scary ESCAPE key (there were signs, as I recall, that said "PLEASE DON'T PRESS ESCAPE!") Totally out of my range, but I liked daydreaming about them. Instead of a computer, for graduating college I got an electronic typewriter with a 3K memory. If I remember right, it was about $500. I thought it was fabulous. I'd type into the memory (watching my words scroll across the 2-inch LCD screen) and then load a piece of paper, press a key, and watch the typewriter bang out the page.

Magic!

In 1986, I bought my first PC for $800. It was an XT-compatible custom-built by a professor and contained two 5.25" floppy drives and no hard drive. When you wanted to use your computer, you put a DOS boot disk in the top floppy drive (A:) and waited for about 10 minutes for the system to be ready. Then you took out the boot disk and put in a disk containing a software program--say, IBM Writing Assistant, which let you create documents. You would type a command to start the software (say, write). Then you would type your document. When you wanted to save it, you would put a formatted data disk in the bottom floppy drive (B:). Saving your file would take about a minute, and the computer would make grinding noises.

A few years later, I realized I needed a hard drive. I sent away for one from an electronics store in Brooklyn and installed it myself. I thought I remembered that hard drive was 20 MB, but as I research what that would have cost in 1989, I realize that I could never have afforded so much storage. Maybe 10? Whatever the case, it was fabulous not needing to put a disk in the drive to boot up, and I remember thinking there was no way I'd ever need more.

Ha.

At work, I went from a typewriter to a Wang word processor, which was connected to a letter-quality printer that actually typed out the documents. There was no email. I typed out memos on the word processor, printed them out, and delivered them by hand or put them in envelopes and sent them by mail. By 1991, my business unit had a single IBM 286, loaded with Microsoft Windows, which we all shared.

Then we moved to Seattle to go back to school, and used our student loans to replace my old PC-XT with a 386. It seemed so slick! The top floppy drive (A:) was for a 3.5" disk; the bottom was for a 5.25" disk. It came with a modem that promised fast connections and we used it to access the Internet, such as it was in the early 1990s. Text and UNIX-based, more interesting for the fact that it existed at all than for what you could actually do with it.

It was in Seattle that I bought my first laptop. It was reconditioned, so I was able to get it for less than $1000, which I considered a coup. I loved the novelty of it. I could write at the local cafe.

It was also in Seattle that my conversion from (text-based) WordPerfect to (GUI-based) Word happened. In a Microsoft town, there was really no other possible outcome. I still missed the "old" WordPerfect for a long time, though--the WordPerfect for Windows never caught on with me.

The World Wide Web was starting to make the Internet more interesting. But at the company where I worked (1993-1995), technology managers doubted the utility of providing employees with access to the Internet. They also doubted the benefit of the company investing in its own website.

They have a pretty slick site now, though.

Since leaving school, we have changed computers every few years. Each time we get a new one, it seems improbable that we should ever need more (speed, storage, functionality), but software continues to increase in complexity as the dual costs of storage and memory continue to diminish. Our entire music collection (more than 500 CDs) is on a hard drive now, and I look forward to the day that we'll be able to store our DVD library on disk, too.

From a world in which a two-hour download of the text of a single newspaper was considered a marvel, to a world in which such access is nearly instantaneous, and in which I can ask my computer virtually any question and get a pertinent answer, in fewer than 30 years.

I can't even remember how I did some things before I did them electronically. I guess before there were online options, I used to look up airlines in the phonebook and how much it would cost for a ticket or go visit a travel agent. And we would mail away to government tourist bureaus to get information on what to do in faraway places (like Nova Scotia, where we took a vacation in 1999). Of course, before Mapquest, we had maps.

Made out of paper. Really.

For big trips, we would call up the Automobile Association of America and ask for a Triptik to be drawn up.

And when we wanted to buy things, we had to go to stores. In person. Every time.

Crazy, huh?

"D'oh" Moment of the Day

Watching North by Northwest at home last night (for the umpteenth time--it's a great favorite of ours) and suddenly noticed all the diagonals in the shots--from the opening credits, which feature the exposed steel grid of a modern office building on the bias, to scenes of Cary Grant clambering among the unusually angled support stilts of an ultramodern house near the Mt. Rushmore national monument in South Dakota.

I wondered why that was, throughout the movie, and was still wondering this morning, so I decided to try a Google search.

The "D'oh" came as I was typing in the words "north by northwest diagonals" into the Google search box.

At least I didn't have to see the search results before I had my "aha." And this is not to say that there aren't all sorts of other good reasons to shoot on the diagonal--adding to the sense of action, of things being off-kilter, and so forth.

But, clearly, N-NW is a diagonal.

Recent Deaths

Reading my high school alumni newsletter, I learned that a man I graduated with died of cancer last spring. I think he was the valedictorian. I have only the vaguest memory of his face and his big glasses.

And I learned that my eighth-grade English teacher died in June. "Before he became a teacher, he performed professionally as a jazz drummer." Who knew? If we had known, most of us would probably have shrugged and said, What is jazz?

Eighth graders are idiots.

I remember a person who was passionate about literature, ironic, and impatient with stupidity--yet, sometimes, resigned to it. I think we read Macbeth in his class, and Julius Caesar. Maybe Romeo and Juliet, too. I didn't learn to love Shakespeare then, but I learned the plays. Even though I have not reread Julius Caesar since, I remember it.

He had us read the plays out loud, even though we stank at it, even though you could tell he relished reading them himself.

A good teacher. RIP.

Promoting Science

The other night, I attended a presentation sponsored by the Chicago Council on Science and Technology, which seeks to promote more (and accurate) understanding of science and technology. The speaker was Alan Leshner, head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and he talked about science challenges for the new millennium.

These mainly involve the disconnect between a large swath of American opinion and the goals and conclusions of science. Where science conflicts with what Leshner called "core values," Americans tend to just look the other way. So we have a remarkable proportion of citizens who don't accept that humans developed from a simian ancestor, or that the earth is billions of years old. A remarkable proportion of Americans simply don't trust scientists, and look at scientific conclusions as opinions they can take or leave.

Leshner proposed that to deal with this problem, scientists need to do a better job of communicating with the public rather than to the public.

This response seems rather facile. A preposition change is not sufficient. I think the problem needs to be dealt with by dramatizing why these scientific conclusions matter. I am not entirely sure how to do this, but I think it's crucial. For example, millions of Americans are able to reject Darwin's theory of evolution (particularly as it pertains to human beings) because ultimately they feel it doesn't make any difference what they think about it.

We do not live in a society where truth/reality is valued for its own sake. Our public discourse is riddled with lies and spin, and we pretty much have to decide what we think before we decide who we're going to listen to. People are treating scientific conclusions the same way. After all, there are so many scientific conclusions, and they frequently contradict each other: coffee is good for you; coffee is bad for you. In a society where we're overloaded with information, we largely ignore stuff we don't see a way to use or doesn't fit with our world view.

Scientists (and their communicators and policymakers) need to figure out how to make critical scientific conclusions relevant to Americans. Maybe it's by reminding us of why the practice of science is important. What happens when you don't do science properly? How do problems get solved if you pick and choose the conclusions you like best? As some scientists like to joke (with regard to creationists who call evolution "just a theory"), gravity is just a theory--how would you like to jump out that window?

Maybe what we need is an ad campaign that warns us of the consequences of bad science and of ignoring scientific conclusions. People hear about the rewards all the time; they're all around us. The rewards of science are so ubiquitous that we almost feel they're natural occurences. So let's focus on what happens when we don't teach kids to be good scientists, and when our decision makers and policy makers are science ignoramuses (ignorami?).

Our society in recent years has come perilously close to valorizing ignorance (see Idiocracy).

Let's change that.

Another Cyclist Killed

Yesterday I was home reading a book when I heard a blaring car horn and then a crash. I live right above Lake Shore Drive, so (unfortunately) that sequence of sounds isn't terribly unusual, but when I got up to look out the window I expected a fender-bender on the Inner Drive and not to see a bicyclist sprawled in the middle of the Outer Drive. I watched as crowds gathered, emergency vehicles arrived, and the cyclist was (finally) zipped into a body bag (I really wanted to know if he was still alive; the body bag told me, finally, that he was not).

It was terribly sad, and, more, I couldn't understand it--what was the cyclist doing on the Outer Drive? News accounts have been no help. The Trib and Sun-Times both posted inaccurate and incomplete stories about the event (one says the cyclist died enroute to the hospital, the other says a man was trying to cross LSD and makes no mention of the bicyclist).

A witness, in the Sun-Times story comments, says,

This report is inaccurate. The cyclist was going northbound on inner LSD when he was hit by a cab (who fled the scene), thrown into southbound outer LSD where he was hit by another vehicle. I live at this site and was there when it happened.
It's not good to disparage the dead by insinuating he was trying to do someting stupid like walking/riding accross outer LSD!

It is frustrating that our local papers are not getting reporters out there to cover this very local story. And meanwhile, this cyclist is assumed by most folks who hear about this to be a suicidal idiot and not a victim of typical motorist carelessness (I don't mean the motorists on the Outer Drive, but the cab on the Inner Drive).

Tea-light

Once in a while, I have an "aha" moment that makes me feel like a total idiot. I've been a tea drinker for a long time, but recently we got a new teapot after a long time without one (previous pots had broken or been lost). This enabled me to use (for the first time in a while) our tea warmer, which is a thick glass almost-cylinder with a hollowed-out space in the middle that fits a tealight candle.

Have you guessed my "aha" moment yet?

Oh, they're called tea-light candles because they fit in tea warmers!

Who knew?

(I know...everybody but me.)

From Terns to Technology...

Sat for a while out by the lake and listened to Caspian terns as they soared over me, back and forth between Belmont Harbor and Lake Michigan. For such a beautiful bird, they make a pretty awful sound; that's not too unusual, though. Great blue herons, also great beauties, don't sound too pretty, either.

Which brings me to a poem by Charles Reznikoff, which all this puts in my mind, and which I would never be able to put my hand on so quickly were it not for the wonders of Google. This is a poem that an old teacher of mine copied out for me ages ago (and his 20-odd-year-old letter is doubtless at the bottom of a box somewhere) in response to my guilty confession that I wasn't very productive. Here's the snippet, from Reznikoff's "Jerusalem the Golden":

55
You tell me that you write only a little now.
I wrote this a year or two ago
about a girl whose stories I had read
and wished to meet:

The traveller
whom a bird's notes surprise--
his eyes
search the trees

And when I met her she was plain enough.
So is the nightingale, they say--
And I am glad that you do not belong
To those whose beauty is all song

How did I find this obscure poem without going into the other room and poring through the several volumes of Reznikoff sitting on my bookshelf? Simply typing "beauty is all song" and "nightingale" into the search box brought up not simply the proper book, but the page.

Google. What did we ever do without it?

Spring is Back

We've had the nuttiest weather this year. It's only our fourth winter in Chicago, and we were told that this was more like a real Chicago winter--the past three were unusually mild.

The coldness of the winter wasn't the worst part, though. The worst part has been the reluctance of spring to really settle in. Some warm days here and there, enough to get you excited, and then all of a sudden, snow.

But today temperatures are in the 60s, the sun is out, and I'm remembering that it's never consistently nice until Mother's Day, so I shouldn't be surprised. And also, the bonus is that it typically stays nice until almost Thanksgiving, which isn't bad at all.

The migrating birds have been doing their thing regardless of the weather's fickleness; brown creepers and other woodpeckers are visible, and a variety of sparrows and wrens. In the lake, we have seen various grebes passing through; I think the buffleheads and goldeneyes (winter visitors) are gone now.

And the bunnies have been back for a few weeks already, but the grassy fenced lot on Sheridan Road, where I always look for them, has a sign posted announcing construction of a new apartment building.