Cover story in the May National Geographic: ‘The Great Plains: Change
of Heartland.’ Focuses on the un-settlement of the Plains and the
(supposed) comeback of the buffalo and Native Americans. Yeah, at this
point you have to get the magazine for the full story, which is
beautifully shot. But the online tease for the story contains one stunning picture that’s representative of the powerful pictures in the magazine.
My Current Data Crush
Wikipedia: "…an open-content encyclopedia in many languages. … started in January 2001 … 251,571 articles in the English version." For one of the features on our show, "TechLive," I check its daily almanac of historical events (here’s today’s). Pretty amazing what a bunch of smart volunteers can do.
April Tornadoes
News of the tornado that hit Utica, Illinois, on Tuesday night made me think about the deadly twisters (see, I still have some newspaper guy in me) that hit northern Illinois on April 21, 1967. I remember the day because Mom picked me up at school and we had to get off the road when an extremely intense thunderstorm swept through; she pulled off Exchange Street into an abandoned farm yard in what is now a commercial area in University Park. It was only about 4 in the afternoon, but the sky was nearly black and it rained so hard for about five or ten minutes that you couldn’t see to drive. As it turned out, storms were sweeping the entire region. At 4:30, a twister hit a high school in Belvedere, just outside Rockford, killed 24 and injured 400. About 45 minutes later, another tornado struck Oak Lawn and nearby suburbs, about 20 miles north of us, killing 33 and injuring 500.
Austrian Housepainter
Living in a place that has its very own Austrian immigrant
fixing things for the Volk — I mean the people — I need to
acknowledge what I think every year on this date: that it’s Hitler’s
birthday. Der Fuehrer, 1889-1945. As the Franz Liebkind (crazy German
playwright) character says in "The Producers":
"Hitler! There was a painter! He could paint an entire apartment in a single afternoon. Two coats!"
Of course, unlike most housepainters — OK,
any other housepainter I can think of, though I haven’t checked
Stalin’s or Genghis Khan’s resumes — this one got a commotion
going that killed 50 or 60 or 70 million people.
All the Poop That’s Fit to Report
In the quest to find out more about ShitBegone toilet paper — facts such as, is it real? — I happened upon this stunning source of excretory information: PoopReport.com.
Full of useful and fun facts and speculation, such as a quick
user review of the Toto Drake toilet — it disposes of absolutely
anything, despite using just 1.6 gallons per flush; and a report on
whether terrorists might launch a strike on the United States by
spiking our toilet paper.
And oh, yes, there’s a nice little interview with the creator of ShitBegone, a Brooklyn lad named Jed Ela.
[Generic] Toilet Paper
You can’t get much more basic than this: ShitBegone. Advertised as "100 percent recycled toilet paper," which might give your imagination some exercise. Ninety-six rolls for $44.99. Lovely — though I will quibble with how the name is rendered. "Shitbegone" follows "woebegone"; so it could be interpreted as "overcome by shit" — which would probably make it the perfect toilet paper for our times. If I were marketing director, or nitpicker in residence, I’d have fought for ShitBeGone.
By way of Boing Boing.
Mercenaries in Iraq
Good long feature
in Monday’s New York Times on the "private security companies"
operating in Iraq. Of course, when I think of "security companies" and
"security guards," I think of some poor guy taking lip from a
late-night patron of White Castle. But the Times piece makes it clear
that, semantics aside, these outfits in Iraq and their employees are
hardly distinguishable from the traditional picture of the mercenary:
With every week of insurgency in a war zone with no front, these
companies are becoming more deeply enmeshed in combat, in some cases
all but obliterating distinctions between professional troops and
private commandos. Company executives see a clear boundary between
their defensive roles as protectors and the offensive operations of the
military. But more and more, they give the appearance of private,
for-profit militias — by several estimates, a force of roughly 20,000
on top of an American military presence of 130,000. … By some recent government
estimates, security costs could claim up to 25 percent of the $18
billion budgeted for reconstruction, a huge and mostly unanticipated
expense that could delay or force the cancellation of billions of
dollars worth of projects to rebuild schools, water treatment plants,
electric lines and oil refineries."
Rich Fudgy Brownies
The Associated Press roundup on the MoveOn.org
bake sale (carried in the San Francisco Chronicle and a handful of
other papers) says that the activists put on about 1,000 or 1,100 bake
sales that brought in a total of about $250,000. Among the smattering
of other coverage, local stories in the Santa Cruz Sentinel and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. The Los Angeles Times had a squib or a squib and a half that I notice the Chicago Tribune picked up.
Bake Sales
Well, Kate and I spent a couple hours this morning walking around to MoveOn bake sales
in our general neighborhood. On one level, it seems like touchy-feely
naivete: Bake sales to defeat Bush? Yeah, right. On the other hand, it
was really encouraging to see the enthusiasm for the idea around town
and the determination people have that the small things they’re doing
in their own communities, and the money they’re gathering, could build
into something big. Of course, this is Berkeley, and you could get
people to do bake sales for nearly anything; at one gathering, someone
said there were 19 MoveOn bake sales around town; I’ll bet there were
even more. But I wonder how many there were in, say, Kansas.(I just
searched on the MoveOn site for future bake sales within 3 miles of our
zip code, and got five results. I checked for similar events coming up
within 300 miles of Wichita and got three hits. And actually, MoveOn has a map that illustrates where the bake sale hot spots were and weren’t) More on
this tomorrow.
What People Want and Need
This should have been posted April 13. But it wasn’t because of repeated Radio UserLand finicks.
And now the news:
Kate sent me one of the daily entries from Minnesota Public Radio’s "The Writer’s Almanac."
I like it. That’s an official endorsement, though be assured no money
changed hands for it. It’s a nice collection of daily trivia on
writerly stuff that wanders into historical stuff. The other day was
the anniversary of the opening of Galileo’s trial, so the almanac
contained a short essay on why Galileo mattered and still does.
Yesterday, or now the day before yesterday, the 13th, it was Thomas
Jefferson’s birthday. He was actually born on April 2 in 1743 — so I
count him as a birthday pal — but the date was moved when Britain and
the colonies ditched the Julian calendar for the Gregorian in 1752. No
extra charge for that information — I’ve always been fascinated by the
idea of a bunch of people having their birthdays changed.
But what I really wanted to write about was this note in the little almanac section on Eudora Welty, also born on the 13th:
"She tried getting a job in advertising but, she said, ‘It was too much like
sticking pins into people to make them buy things they didn’t need or really
want.’ "
So two things:
First, that’s why I think I am/would be no good at selling or promoting
or marketing stuff — goods, merchandise, services that you ought to
pay for if you want to be sated, satisfied, or successful. A voice
inside says, "You know, this is really in my interest, not yours, to
take this off my hands. And is it really as good as I’m telling you it
is? And is it what you need?"
But — and this is point two — I think the reason I’ve stuck to news or
things that closely resemble news is that I’ve always believed and
felt, mind and heart, that it’s something people really do need and
want. Still do, and that’s what makes the job fun still even if you
hear me whining.