The Tin Lizard

Do Dogs Wonder?

My wife and I walk for exercise most mornings.  If we are running a little late, we run into the dogwalkers, who tend to emerge about 7 AM.

In our area we have a fairly strict leash law which, fortunately for those of us who don't have pooches, is almost universally observed.  So it's not at all unusual to happen by when the owner is bending over with his/her little plastic bag while the dog stands nearby, waiting patiently to continue the walk.

I've always thought the dogs must be wondering, "Jeez, what do they WANT with that stuff?" or "Ick! What are they gonna DO with that?"

Memorializing Eisenhower Or Not

I've mentioned the planned Eisenhower Memorial  before ... its original design, by Frank Gehry, seemed a little flukey, but on the other hand, too many of our public monuments seem to become paeans to the artistic values of the last century -- to wit, the ruin of the original clean design of the Vietnam War memorial, the WW II memorial, the clunky Martin Luther King memorial -- while this one did have some promise of standing out from the crowd. 

It also drew complaints from the Eisenhower family, but I tend to believe the family should be invited to butt out in these matters -- the monument isn't for their benefit. 

Ultimately, the original design was withdrawn (so now I'm certain, we'll be headed back toward pre-traditional style).  Architecture critic Fred Bernstein has an original idea.  He suggests that in light of all the controversy, we just not build any Eisenhower monument. 

To me, that's very reasonable thinking.  So of course it will never prevail.  But as Bernstein points out, there are a number of monuments for Eisenhower in various places; and as he doesn't point out, there are far too many monuments and narrow-interest museums in the District of Columbia anyway.  I also believe Ike would have understood the desirability of saving the money in these austere times.  Let's pass on this one.

Keeping The Music Coming II

To summarize my last post:  the compact disc is obsolete technology, I'm moving all my music online, but it's discouraging to think about all the times I've had to do this.

The other reason I hesitate with the task is the sheer labor of it.  I recall just a couple of years ago when I got energized to preserve a lifetime of photographs in digital form.  Energized for a month or two, until I realized that each of several thousand photos would require about three minutes or longer to scan, tweak, and store  -- and working with old negatives or slides, the results would still be far from perfect. 

I've done enough research to know that digitizing music is easier and quicker than film; I can probably get the job done in two or three months in my spare time. 

But there remains the Sisyphean nature of the process.  My music will now have been reborn at least four times in various formats.  Each time looked like it would be the last. Digital music looks perfect now, but I'm sure that in ten or fifteen years or less, there will be something to replace it.  Maybe in future, we'll have some little chip embedded in our brains at birth.  Is updating even worth the effort, or should I just be happy with the radio?  

Doesn't this whole process imply that a whole lot of modern living is no more than just keeping up with "stuff" that we own?  And in that case, do we really own it, or does it own us?   It's hard to deny that the material culture, usually interpreted in American society as progress that benefits us, at the same time also has its costs, both in money spent and in quality of life.  

We each make our own judgment as to where we want to be on that scale.  Certainly our affluent society pushes us toward the higher end - buy that 100-inch television, that new car, or that new house!   And perhaps it's only as we age that we begin to consider more seriously the choices we have in that regard:   Digitize your music collection but let the photos rot.   Trade in your three-year-old car or keep it for a decade.  What's important is to recognize we (most of us anyway) have such choices, and not to allow ourselves to be swept willy-nilly into the maelstrom of acquisition for its own sake.

 

Keeping The Music Coming I

I recently began the process of digitizing my CD collection.  Music stored as electrons is the future.  The compact disc is already outmoded, a fact that was brought home to me lately by touring the Washington DC car show last month -- many cars, especially those with a younger demographic, don't offer a CD slot any longer.

I approach the task with reluctance, because I've already made this "tech-tonic" shift several times in my lifetime.  LP records were the only medium for buying music in my high school and college days, but even then their problems were legion:  too easy to scratch and warp, too voluminous and heavy. 

The easy access to tech gear during my short stretch in the military led me to the magic of reel-to-reel tape; after mustering out I could (and did) put as many as five or six LPs on a single reel of tape, a medium that was less subject to damage.  Not too much later, the cassette was perfected enough to become a hi-fi medium, and it had the added advantage of being playable in the car, so for a few years I used both tape media indiscriminately (but I still had to buy LPs, record them, and discard or sell the LPs).

Finally came perfection:  the compact disc.  More compact, almost indestructible.  I remember buying my first ones in 1986.  Ultimately the weight and volume of my old tapes started to become a nuisance (not to mention the high cost and decreasing availability of equipment on which to play them).   I began at some point to replace my taped music with CD versions of the same;  recording to CD wasn't possible then for the consumer.   About a dozen years later, I just pitched out all the tapes - many of which hadn't been played in ten years - and donated my last reel-to-reel tape recorder.

So the CD has had a surprisingly long run for a consumer technology - almost 30 years - but clearly now, its time is past.  No more clutter of physical media at all, just little blips stored on your computer, or better yet, in the "cloud."   (Well, OK, yes, you can transfer those blips to tiny physical media like SD cards, music players, or flash drives when/if you want.)

Can Christmas Survive In A Multicultural Society?

The end of the year is rife with holidays, from Veterans Day to Thanksgiving, and on through Christmas and New Year's Day.   But all is not well in holiday-land.  People (one of us anyway) are beginning to reject the idea of a triple holiday honoring veterans, and Thanksgiving is under attack from Sears and others (see yesterday's Tin Lizard). 

Now, Christmas is under predictable pressure, as other religions begin to push for having their own religious holidays marked as "official."  Muslims seeking no-school days for their religious calendar in Montgomery County, Maryland, are but the tip of an iceberg that - unlike the typical iceberg - won't melt away, but will grow ever larger.  It seems entirely fair, yet it's something we obviously can't afford, at least not until robots are doing absolutely everything for us, kids no longer need to learn, and humankind no longer needs to be productive.

It seems an ideal time to revisit the Morning Fog revised holiday plan, which offers a solution for exactly this sort of problem.  This idea was too far ahead of its time when first proposed a couple of years ago, but with Republicans and Democrats now looking for something on which they can agree, it may be just the ticket.  There's something to like (and dislike) for everyone. 

 

Thanksgiving Attack

In only a few days now, Americans will be celebrating that most American of holidays, Thanksgiving, the one holiday in which we all share equally, regardless of race, creed, gender, sexual orientation, or the number of fingers on our hands; and also the one that has remained remarkably untainted by commercialism.

Until now.  Some major retailers (Sears, Target), with others sure to follow, are opening stores to shoppers on Thanksgiving evening.  No more waiting until midnight for those bargains!  The motivation is pure greed:  Stores want to get more of your money, sooner.  No waiting until tomorrow to acquire your dollars if they can have them today!  And they'll gradually expand hours in coming years so that Thanksgiving can be just another day to go buy something.  (Pity their poor employees.)

The stores offer the justification that consumers want to shop on Thanksgiving, nobody's doing much of anything Thanksgiving afternoon anyway.  They're probably right about that:  I'm sure there are people - lots of them - prepared or even eager to dash out that evening to acquire a fantastic bargain on a television the size of a football field, or other such essential merchandise.  

If you're not among that group, you can stay home (and boycott these stores for the season if you like); but your holiday will still be different if your wife, or even your uncle Harry, plans to rush out to the nearest mall.

 

 

 

Will The Real Holiday Please Stand Up?

Which statement is correct?

Last Sunday was Veterans Day in the U.S. 
Last Monday was Veterans Day in the U.S.

They both are.  When Washington calendar-manglers decided, in the early seventies, that nearly all our national holiday observations should always take place on a Monday, Veterans Day was included in that sweeping proclamation, to occur on the fourth Monday of October.

But it wasn't long before veterans' groups pushed to retain the original date, November 11, because of its historic significance as the date of the armistice that ended WW I).  That move was duly approved, and Veterans Day was officially restored to November 11.

Or not.  This year, we have the confusing situation of two Veterans Days, for no better reason than that November 11 fell on Sunday, so nobody got the day off.  Call me old school, but it seems sensible to me that a holiday with a specific date should be observed on that date.  If it happens to fall on a Saturday or Sunday, that's too bad.  Particularly since veterans specifically requested it be observed always on November 11. 

Moreover, in the case of Veterans Day, the things we normally do to observe the day can be accomplished perfectly well on a Sunday (maybe better):  parades, observances, and the like.  And even moremoreover, we already have another day honoring veterans -- Memorial Day, in May. 

The push for all these Monday holidays is/was commercially driven.  For retailers, any day off is a day that people should devote to shopping.  In all cases, it cheapens the meaning of the holiday by turning it into a fire sale.  Let's restore integrity to Veterans Day, and productivity to our economy.   

Life On The Dark Side

It's 5:30 AM.  I'm up for the day.  It's pitch black outside.  

Most days, I'm set to walk at 5:45 or so (exercise is best done in the morning, and before eating) but it's still pitch black outside.  Not very pleasant for a walk; you can't see anything, including the ankle-twisting potholes in the street.

But it's Tuesday.  Tuesdays, I usually combine a shorter walk with a bit of weight training, which begins at a leisurely 7:00 AM.  It's time to go but it's still dark outside, with the sky showing just a hint of gray so I can start to make out the shapes of trees.  Dark at 7:00 AM?  It should never be dark at 7:00 AM.  It's unnatural.

Working folks are up getting set to go to work, using electric lights, but they'll need light in the house when they get home at 6:00 too, so nothing is being saved in power consumption.

Kids are walking to their school bus stops at this hour, along dark streets, few of which have sidewalks.

In a few days, those kids  (if they're not hit by a school bus) will be out trick-or-treating between 5:30-6:30, but it will be just dusk for many of them, too light for a good scary Halloween experience.

Also in a few days, the country will switch back to "standard" time.  Saturday evening, everyone in the country will waste time (ranging from 10 minutes to 30, depending) resetting clocks, timers, thermostats and such to the new time  And Sunday morning, a higher than average number of people will have heart attacks and die that morning.  . 

All of this is due to daylight saving time, particularly to the ridiculous and unnecessary extension of it into November.

Up in Massachusetts, or maybe just a few miles away from my house, on Capitol Hill, Congressman Ed Markey, a diehard fan of daylight time, may be stirring in bed (we're told he gets up "early" - around 7:00 !) and thinks that's early enough for the sun to rise.  In his line of "work" he can get to his office at 9:00, or 10:00 or not at all.   Sweet!   Right now, though, a few minutes past 7:00, he may see the sun coming over the horizon, but it will still be too dark in his house to read, so he'll have to turn on the light if he wants to review the report he commissioned a few years ago from the Department of Energy, which strove mightily though unsuccessfully to prove that daylight saving time provides energy savings. 

On November 6, I would happily vote for whichever candidate will promise to put and end to DST.  Barack, Mitt -- please get back to me on this! 

Flag Burning - Dangerous To Your Health?

Check this out:  A protester in Pakistan reportedly died from breathing the fumes of a U.S. flag he was burning.

If this story is true, it's certainly one of the best actualizations of the concept of "poetic justice" that I've ever seen.   Protesters, evidently, should take care to acquire better flags for burning, making sure ahead of time that they're made of all-natural fabric. 

So here's another victim of the violence.  I have no trouble thinking of a death as pure accident sometimes, but many these days like to assign blame.  If so, blame here lies with the protester himself, and the people who may have stirred him up to act.  And I have no doubt that purposeful provocation was at the root of the violence we've seen in many Muslim countries lately.   

But speaking of fabric, this report makes me think how complex is the fabric of the typical violent mob.  We shouldn't consider that everyone is acting out of hatred of the U.S. -- many are probably just college students letting off a little steam.  The catalyst may be provided by someone acting out of political motives; we've experienced that right here at home, back in the 60s and much more recently in the tea-party disruptions of political dialogue a couple of years ago. 

What's interesting about mobs, though, is how often the individuals who compose them can so readily explode even though they may not give a hoot about the ostensible "cause" that someone offers up.  Witness for example the mayhem that erupted more than once a few years back, at the hands of University of Maryland students, over the mere outcome of a football game.  Should we suppose that those students just had a deep-rooted hatred of the town of College Park, Maryland, that they savaged?  Probably not.

No, violence in a group, let's admit it, can just be fun.  It may be "as American as apple pie," but the Egyptian/Pakistani/Libyan cases demonstrate that it's broader than that - I don't think apple pie is a big deal in any of those countries, unless they're getting them from the American hamburger joints they're burning.

Forsaking Facebook

A feature article because a woman decided to close her Facebook account? 

So it seems.  True, this particular woman happens to have been a wordsmith for Mark Zuckerberg, so her story might be of greater curiosity, or shock value, than that of the average Facebook user.   But there is less of a story than meets the eye, because it turns out that this woman (one Ms. Katherine Losse) left Facebook more as an experiment than as a final decision, and eventually reopened her page.

Nevertheless, I think the story has resonance because of the poor showing Facebook has made in financial markets since going public.  

I've got a Facebook account too, suggested to me by more than one friend two or three years ago as a way to stay current with - or even to locate - old friends from whom I'd drifted apart.  Yet I recently realized that it had been two months (at least) since I had last bothered to check in to my Facebook account.

Why?  A variety of things.  I evidently didn't feel I was getting much that was useful from Facebook.   It hadn't taken too long for me to get sick of Zuckerberg's highhanded way of changing account features without notice, and of his dubious use of people's data.   More recently, it developed that it's almost impossible to avoid Facebook:  browsers will suck in your data and connections from it automatically; smart phones will start trying to connect you up to it; far too many websites now suggest you log in using Facebook data, meaning that they can link up to your contacts and "likes" too.

In short, Facebook sits astride the internet highway collecting a huge toll in terms of privacy, though it neither built nor maintains the highway; it offers relatively little that's useful, and - worst - requires a huge amount of my time if I want to manage where and how my information is going or being used (and keep up with the site's constantly changing rules and SOPs).  

I still have my account for now, but I suspect of the reported 900 million users, there must be a huge number like me, whose use for and interest in Zuckerberg's creation is occasional and only minimally enthusiastic.   It's not surprising the stock is doing poorly. I suspect the company's destiny is to be a flash in the pan.