Category Archives: Random Access

Random Access, the op-ed.

Back to School?

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Big Mistake. Really big mistake. Today, as I write this, is July 7. I realize it may not be July 7 where you are or when you read this, but I can live with that. Here and now it is definitely the Monday after our long weekend long birthday celebration for America and the Back to School sales have already started.

Franklin County, Vermont, celebrates the Fourth of July twice: once on the Fourth of July and once on the Sunday closest to the Fourth of July when thousands of residents and guests crowd in to St. Albans Bay for a day of family stuff, music, and fireworks. I got my Summer Sounds concert band, Rumble Doll, set up, got my mug on teevee, and, of course, spent some quality time in the lake. My new sandals seem to have stood up to total immersion.

Tom Oliver did a great job with the fireworks; this may have been his best yet with some new “spiders” that dropped their legs all the way to the water and a finale that included high and low skybursts with Roman candles.

And it took only an hour for enough cars to clear out that I could drive home.

Summer.

The entire summer is ahead of us.

I don’t know about the rest of the world but I don’t want to be in a classroom in July.

We read the Burlington Free Press on Sundays here in Vermont because it is the only Sunday paper sold here that has a TV section and a reasonable number of advertising inserts for the stores we patronize.

I like the sales, see…

The sales often confuse me, though. I have to wonder why stores expect to sell Summer clothing in February, Winter clothing in June, and school supplies this week.

Staples® has “one cent deals” through Wednesday as part of the Back to School ’08 national promotion. I’m reading their advertising flier now. Dixon® #2 yellow pencils for a penny. I like #2 pencils and Dixon® makes pretty good ones but does anyone actually use wooden pencils anymore? There are two-pocket paper folders for a penny, too. I like two-pocket folders but I don’t use them much for reports because I prefer a report that reads like a book, so I use staples or a folder that grabs the edges.

Back to school? It is weeks, count ’em, long weeks before school starts.

The mistake? Timing is everything. The stores obviously should have held the sales in June when people were still actually thinking about school, not now when I want to sit on the beach. That was easy®.

America needs trucks

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I’m not a carpenter, but I do haul sheets of plywood. I’m not a garbage man, but I do haul trash to the dump. I’m not a yardman, but I do tow my broken down tractor around. I need a truck.

My op-ed in the Detroit Free Press was an open letter to Bob Lutz, Vice Chairman and general visionary of Global Product Development at GM.

Dear Bob Lutz, I wrote:

GM needs to lead the market. You can touch the real heart of America with GM innovation. If you can put a 30-m.p.g. truck in the showroom this year and build the new 35-m.p.g. truck for 2011, the rest of the product line would fly again. Read the entire op-ed here..

We’re dying here. GM has to do something.

So. Anybody know how to get to Mr. Lutz? If so, send him a copy, would you?

Ain’t Got No Culture

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A town without a library is a town without culture.

On July 2, the Monroe County (Florida) Board of Commissioners were to meet to consider the permanent closure of the Marathon, Big Pine, and Islamorada branches of the Monroe County Public Library. This closure would come on the heels of a significant decrease in library hours.

I am pleased to report that Mayor Mario Di Gennaro told us Friday that the library cuts are off the table. I am displeased to report that the cuts were on the table in the first place.

The Commissioners had hoped to save less than $10 per capita.

Once closed, these libraries would never reopen.

Closure is a cultural as well as an economic issue that will affect every business in the Keys. The loss of our library sends this unmistakable message: “The Monroe County Commissioners do not value learning or culture.” Our residents demand the learning and our visitors demand the culture. And, of course, vice versa.

These library branches serve thousands of residents and tourists alike. Over 1,200 children have library cards and use our library to check out books and other materials.

Popular reading materials still make the bulk of the collection; that’s wonderful for everyday readers, but there is so much more. The library provides reading at preschools, home-school support, youth programs, and research help (I have recently used the Marathon branch to learn how to remove a Chrysler Lebaron gas tank and I have researched local history there).

Home-school support has a nice warm-and-fuzzy feel to it but it is a serious economic issue: imagine the budget impact if just 10 home-schooled kids re-entered the traditional school system because the Commisioners closed the library. Or 50 home-schooled kids. At over $10,000 per student per year.

It may be difficult for those of us reading or responding to this blog to believe that some people really do not have computers or Internet access. Many people do not. Libraries fill that void.

The free computer use for Monroe County citizens enables food stamp, social services assistance, and unemployment benefit applications. Users can conduct online job searches. They can prepare taxes and Social Security applications. They have access to Florida State services, statutes, and resources.

And users can read the news.

There is nothing more important to a free society than the free availability of the news.

I’m thinking that in this election year the Commissioners knew we would lose any Commissioners who lose us our libraries.

And that would be news.

Hoofbeats

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The End is nigh. The hoofbeats of the Four Horsemen have sounded. I am about to agree with Gary Trudeau. A couple-three years ago, his Doonesbury™ strip introduced Dr. Nathan Null, the Situational Science Adviser™. Here’s an excerpt from that strip:

Young Republican College Kid: “Drat! These pesky scientific facts won’t line up behind my beliefs!”
Situational Science Adviser: “Then Challenge them, Stewie!”
—–
SSA: “Situational Science is about respecting both sides of a scientific argument, not just the one supported by the facts!”
—–
SSA: “That’s why I always teach the controversy like the Evolution Controversy or the Global Warming controversy …
—–
YRCC: “You’re right, Situational Scienceman–I’ll never trust science again! “It’s just too controversial!”
SSA: “Stewie gets it now, folks! Do you?”

Trudeau likes to pound the Bush administration (ya think) but there is a similar effort going on the Far Green camps to use science to forestall and obfuscate rather than simply to report.

Once upon a time I thought this wasn’t a wholesale attempt to discredit science, merely a concerted effort to ramp up tiny observations into generalized Truths to serve their agenda. After all, we are told the Far Right agenda tries to use common folk as cannon or environmental fodder so, situationally, the Far Green agenda must try to shut down one business segment after another.

That worries me, but not as much as what I now see as the wholesale drive to gain power over every facet of your life and mine. How? By discrediting science whenever it appears in public. It has been going on for years.

Big Tobacco tried mightily to discredit Dr. Koop as a poopyhead.

Natural Life Magazine tried mightily to discredit childhood vaccinations.

The Far Right tried mightily to discredit Evolution for 80 years.

Trudeau’s Situational Science Adviser pushed the pesticides controversy, the coal slurry controversy, the Everglades controversy, the acid rain controversy, the mercury controversy, and more.

I know very little about mercury other than its toxicity and ubiquity. And its distance from the Sun. I did read that if you lose a single mercury filling in a ten-acre pond, the EPA would have to ban all fishing, swimming, bathing, and boating in that pond. Makes you wonder why we still have “silver” fillings–or why Al Gore pushes mercury-laden fluorescent light bulbs–innt.

Now, of course, everything from the unnaturally high snowfall in the winter of 2007-08 to the unnatural temperature rise of the Atlantic Ocean is caused by Global Warming, and all a result of Carbon Dioxide.

Heh.

Anybody want to guess the agenda here?

It’s almost the same as mine.

I want you to read this, decide I am brilliant, and do what I tell you is right.

The Far Green wants you decide they are brilliant and do what they tell you is right. But they want more. The Far Green wants to force you and you and you to do what they tell you is right And they are developing the tools to enforce their whims.

One of my correspondents related a story from the historical times after the Tet Offensive when gasoline cost 40 cents per gallon. His friend, a Quaker, had received Conscientious Objector status and was assigned to a group called “Environment!” After working there several months, he said “These guys don’t care a bit about the environment. This is all about power… We, the great and stupid unwashed, needed to be doing what the folks at “Environment!” said we should be doing.”

That was more than 35 years ago.

I think the group Environment! has joined the Extinct Species list but other Far Green groups are growing stronger.

Today their tools include taxes, criminal penalties, and news attacks on science.

Our Quaker friend said then that “if the environmental movement could define Carbon Dioxide as a pollutant, they would have total control.”

OK, everybody inhale … and hold.

Next up will be the ban on that other dangerous chemical, Dihydrogen Monoxide.

Your Carbon Footprint
NASA and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that the earth has entered a natural cooling phase that will last decades.
OTOH, Al and Tipper Gore’s Tennessee home uses about the same amount of electricity as a dozen or more average American homes or at least 156 Swahili villages. The Gore’s Nashville residence is just four times the size of those average American homes and the Gore’s consumption has jumped yet another 10% since their “energy-efficient” home renovations. Do as I say, not as I do, eh Al?

My How We Have Changed

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A friend emailed me this Care 2 Make a Difference presentation. “Gotta love the punchline,” he wrote.

Even if you don’t recognize the voice, the credits show it is Eric Idle singing. Yup, that Eric Idle, of Monty Python fame.

Got me to thinking, that did.

Actually pretty much anything will get me to thinking. A pair of white sox. Cornflakes. A boat wake which is not to be confused with a wake for a boat.

I got to thinking about the media my grandfather grew up with, the media my father grew up with, the media my son grew up with, and the media we are growing now.

My grandfather was born before Mr. Marconi plumbed the airwaves. He heard Edward R. Murrow broadcast the news during World War II and watched Mr. Murrow take down Senator Joseph McCarthy on television. He watched Walter Cronkite tell of men walking on the Moon. He saw the Tiananmen Square Massacre on television and he read my email about it. (As an aside, my great-grandfather was brought to us by a Pony Express rider because the Stork was busy. He lived to see jet aircraft but communications, for him were still by radio, telephone, and mail.)

Making the change from letters and newspapers to radio was life changing in the way the printing press changed lives. Making the change from the instant transmission of radio or television to the instant transmission of email is simply humdrum. I love technology, but email is just a new technology for the same old letters.

See, email is cool, but it’s not revolutionary. After all, email is just a badly spelled letter that gets there really really fast. Think Ben Franklin meets The Flash. Likewise, HDTV is a really neat media but it’s not revolutionary. After all, it’s just movin’ pitchers attached to your radio set.

But the YouTube digital movies and the Flash-based presentations like Mr. Idle’s, that’s a revolution. Thanks to advertising, we are overwhelmed by imagery in color and sound and motion. Like any predator, we need more and more and more color and sound and motion to retain our attention. Movies have color and sound and motion innit.

Oddly, the revolution isn’t the technology this time. The revolution is what we do with the technology that lets us make our own color and sound and motion and deliver it in almost real time to our viewers.

Darn it, now I need to relearn Flash. I’ll try to resist using it on this blog, though.