Ted, Ted, Ted

Quick report: I went to Dave Winer’s panel at the Seybold conference on how independent webloggers covered the disaster compared with the big media powers. Everyone seemed to agree that amateur news publishers provide the service of filtering the huge torrent of information that we all have to deal with. An infinite smorgasbord of filter providers you can choose from to make up your own personal news diet. Two problems with this: One, the part about filtering is true as far as it goes, but all media provide filters. It is the essential value they add, the reason we pay for them. The question that keeps on not getting asked is, what are these filters? What are the particular filters a newspaper editor uses to pick and edit wire service stories? What are the particular filters Jason Kottke uses? What do those filters say about the value of a particular weblogger’s news work? Thanks to weblogs, we get to talk about these things even if we’re not the editor-in-chief of a big newspaper. We should go ahead and do that, explicitly.Two, we actually don’t all live with this vast oversupply of information. About the end of day two, when all the basic events were basically reported, the broadcasters had very little more to offer. For visuals they kept on cycling through the same clips (including the inflammatory and one-sided celebration segment), and a large portion of the talk content they used was filler. One “national security” bureaucrat after another, saying the same things, often verbatim. The papers were not much better, although the newspaper format, thankfully, sometimes allows them to actually say nothing when they have nothing to say.People in the audience made it clear that they had felt let down by the papers’ inability to get the story right instantaneously, given their 24-hour cycle and all the other well-known problems of getting a daily paper out. The panelists, too, spent a lot of their time arguing about who got what information out first. That’s not immaterial, but it does drop in importance as days go by and we start wanting some richer stuff. When I was a reporter we were drilled to act like Right comes before First, by a hair. Sometimes you don’t get the latter; occasionally you don’t get either. Oh well.What’s true is that newspapers are now expected to provide both breaking news and heavy background, and that’s OK. They should try to do that, and when they succeed they are heroes. But I still go to weblogs first, because I want one more thing on top of integrity and professionalism, and that is independence. Much as I like and respect the Times, I trust Jason Kottke’s or Doc Searls’ independence more than the Times’s. Certainly lots more than that of Time, or Useless News and World Distort. I may trust the resources and the professional journalism standards of the big outlets more, much of the time, and those things are very important to me, but independence comes first. I want to be 99 percent sure that what the reporter is telling me is what that reporter has personally judged to be true, and not something they typed up after a phone chat with Donald Rumsfeld.On the other hand, independence doesn’t assure integrity or professionalism. Look at APTN and Reuters, each independent and each implicated in that celebration shot that CNN (also independent, in its own way) used to try to rally us for war. And being an independent doesn’t immunize you to self-censorship. I’m not sure I heard this right, because if I did it was a pretty shocking thing to say, but I think Dave said at the panel, “I usually think for myself, but around these issues I’ve decided not to.” That gave me a little bit of a spine-tingle.
Saturday, September 29

“There was a candlelight vigil in East Jerusalem on the night of the attacks; Yassir Arafat gave blood; schoolchildren around the country took part in moments of silence in reaction to the attacks. And a large part of the nation�s public figures spoke sensibly and generously about the American victims.” Matt Taibbi, pretending for a moment that TV “news” can be analyzed like real news reporting, capably dissects the CNN celebration shot. (But I don’t think I get the McNuggets metaphor.)

My friend Paul (bottom center in this picture) heard the novelist E.L. Doctorow on the radio and thought it so useful that he transcribed it himself and send it out to some friends, bearing out Doctorow’s basic point: “[Democracy] has come as far as it has because writing and thinking is no longer the sole prerogative of the few.” Here is a copy, or you can listen to the recording.

“To present ‘the US’ as some predatory imperialist monolith … can only confuse and disorient. It not only serves as a barrier to genuine internationalism, it overlooks the contradictory character of American history and society.” More evidence that practical, principled and eloquent brainwork can come from anywhere.

An eyewitness named George Weld had his wits about him: “[It] was obvious that part of the difficulty of getting through this was going to be finding the language to describe it. Since then, not only has the poverty of our vocabulary for discussing what has happened to us been painful, but the lack of imagination so many of us have shown in thinking of ways to respond intellectually seems to me to be politically dangerous. A will to interrogate rhetoric and a suspicion of habits of thought are the only things that can give us some purchase on the situation.

“In peacetime, teaching the humanities has often been looked on as the pastime of the decadent or the hopelessly liberal. Now, that work — raising the level of public discourse by training people to think and speak better, and to stretch their critical and moral imaginations — looks essential, and I miss doing it and having it done to me.”

Some more good sense from an unexpected quarter: “Terrorism, in the final analysis, will have to be tackled and destroyed through political initiatives and addressing the causes and grievances that give rise to, and support it. It can only be hoped that these horrendous strikes will bring on to the agenda of the world community the need to comply with international law, respect for the sovereignty of nations, upholding the right of every people to choose their social order, guarantee of equality, both economic and social, to people belonging to all faiths and traditions and, above all, the reversal of an economic order that enslaves three-fourths of humanity. Swift military intervention may provide illusory solace to some for the moment, but it engenders the seeds of future retribution and reprisals.”

Edward Said, as sane and humane as ever in the Al-Ahram Weekly: “We need to step back from the imaginary thresholds that supposedly separate people from each other into supposedly clashing civilisations and re-examine the labels, reconsider the limited resources available, decide somehow to share our fates with each other as in fact cultures mostly have done, despite the bellicose cries and creeds.”

Hear, hear! “I do not find anywhere in the Bible where it states that PK’s are to be perfect and without sin and yet many people take such a position about children of preachers.” An impassioned defense of the only oppressed minority I can claim membership in, unless you count Norwegian-Americans.

Enormous thanks are due to the indispensable Stephy, who stood ready to port my weblog updates from the road during the last seven days. It turned out that Pacific Bell’s much-advertised nationwide roaming service is (surprise!) not quite what it promises; as soon as we were out of California I was unable to get a data connection for more than a few seconds at a time. Finally I stopped trying. Stephy only got to post two updates. The rest of them are still on my Visor. I’ll upload them here as soon as I get around to plugging it into the computer. Bottom line: The trip and the wedding were great, even though only about half the expected participants were able to make it. There will be make-up re-weddings on both coasts in the coming months so that those who couldn’t be there can be there.

Here is what looks to my layperson’s eye like a pretty solid list of pointers for those who want or need to discuss horrible events with their children. Courtesy of Joe Kelly of the Dads And Daughters website, which has a lot more stuff like it.

(Posted 9/18 due to technical difficulties)

The Los Angeles train station is the most full-on temple of Southwesternness I’ve seen. It’s worth a train trip to LA on its own. Decorous Mission tiles, outrageous deco fittings, gracious palmy gardens: you feel exactly like Cary Grant blowing in from New York. Even Amtrak’s efforts to make it conform to its relentless neo-Post Office esthetic can’t dim the place.We spent the day yesterday (Thursday the 13th) at the La Brea Tar Pits, grooving on extinct ungulates and marsupials. The best part is the big glass-enclosed semi-circular lab, part operating theater and part zoo cage, where the paleontologists, in their classic white coats from Central Wardrobe just down Wilshire Boulevard, brush gunk off bones in dogged search of knowledge.The timing of this trip means Laura hasn’t been exposed to more than a few seconds of media about the events. I’m happy not to talk about it myself. You think that in times like these you’d want to share feelings with your fellow citizens and everything, but not those feelings, thank you. Especially men: all Sunday-morning TV military expertise and apocalypse fantasy.

I can’t stop thinking about Madeline Albright last year, when some reporter finally managed to get in a question on the human costs of the Iraq blockade. I can’t remember how many thousands of civilians the sanctions had killed by then (not few, as Rumsfeld put it at the Pentagon last week) by sanctions enforced by US military power. Albright said something to the effect that the cost was worth it, in view of the political goal of getting rid of their president, and quickly moved on. I wonder if that calculus might finally fall out of fashion now that the civilians are ours. I wonder how all those Americans I saw laughing and toasting the massacres of Iraqis during the Gulf War feel now that other louts are toasting our own massacre.

The first thing you notice about train travel is the leisurely pace. Amtrak’s train 11 moseyed into Emeryville about 3 hours late this morning. We spent the time pleasantly at the Borders bookstore across the street, buying the new Bob CD for me and a copy of the Beatles’ Revolver for Laura, who has been crazy about Abbey Road for weeks and really needed something new to listen to.The next thing you notice is the luxury. Even in the cheap seats (we are riding coach on the first leg, to LA, because it’s all daytime and too short to be worth the extra money for a sleeper) you get leg room that makes airline first class look tight. You get to get up and walk around any time. You get to sit down and eat at a table in a civilized fashion. You get the Kiddie Car, which is a whole carpeted room with some toys and a TV. Laura and I are sitting in there now. She is watching a cartoon while I kill time typing. (Check out this cartoon, by the way. It’s called Recess: School’s Out and it’s about kids taking it into their own hands to stop the nefarious forces of high-stakes testing and year-round school. No threat to Pinocchio, but funny and timely.)The third thing you notice is the solitude. I assumed that everyone and their brother would be dashing for the trains after what happened yesterday, but the Emeryville station was as deserted as Wall Street this morning. I guess anyone who decided not to take an airplane either went by car or stayed home. There was a little more traffic on 280 at 8 this morning than you might have expected, come to think of it. On the train there are enough people for the gregarious Lillian to hang with but plenty of room to stretch out.

This is a test. In two days we will start our big train adventure all across this mighty land. First we are taking the Coast Starlight to Los Angeles, where we will inspect the La Brea tar pits under Laura’s expert guidance. The next day we will get on a sleeper car and not get off until we see the amber waves of grain among which my second-youngest sister, Nicolasa, is getting married Saturday. There are lots of places to view aquatic dinosaur bones in Kansas, which was ocean bottom back in the day, so we’ll do some sightseeing too. Then we will get back on the Pullman and head home. I will be reporting to this website from the rails using my nifty wireless Palm modem plus the services of the even niftier Stephy the Postmistress, so keep checking this space.

Had my wisdom teeth taken out Friday afternoon, all four of them. I feel like an idiot, letting the dental vultures talk me into this when I’ve made it this long without the slightest trouble. But I happen to have full dental coverage right now, and there’s no way to tell how long that will last, and there’s always the chance that the dentist is right and something terrible will happen if this lucrative (for the dentist) procedure is not performed right now. Experience teaches that bad dental stuff always happens when you don’t have insurance to pay for it. So I let them incapacitate the lower half of my head and root around in there for about an hour. Afterward, remembering how much fun it was getting caught on a weekend with insufficient painkillers after a root-canal party a few years ago (we spent half a night in an emergency room waiting for a doctor to take 30 seconds for a second prescription), I made the dentist prescribe 50 percent more Vicodin than he thought necessary. That stuff works pretty well, but I found that good old Ibuprofen is just as effective, and comes without the nasty reputation. I think I’ll give the leftover Vicodin back. I don’t need to be any stoneder than I usually am.

I like the bridge, but I love the tunnel.

Not one to let a hot media trend pass her by, Laura has been working on a series of short self-published books. In this one, she offers an unexpected take on her favorite parts of the Wizard of Oz story.

From: Stevens, Martha (ISSAtlanta)
Sent: Friday, September 07, 2001 10:26 AM
To: documentation team
Subject: science fair
Hi, I am a high school sophomore and I have chosen “hacking” as my topic for this year’s science fair.The prize is a pair of tickets to see N’sync, and I, like, really, really, really want to win!!!!Can you send me all your information about hacking? It needs to be 45 to 55 pages long, and please format it in Word with 1.5 inch margins, doublespaced.
Thanks!
Martha Stevens mstevens@iss.net

From: Kuster, Ted (ISS San Mateo)
Sent: Friday, September 07, 2001 2:04 PM
To: Stevens, Martha (ISSAtlanta); document
Subject: RE: science fair
Everything I know about hacking I learned here:http://www.northdoorway.com/camping/machete-axe.htmHave fun with the science project.

From: Thomas, Chet (ISS Atlanta)
Sent: Friday, September 07, 2001 11:14 AM
To: Kuster, Ted (ISS San Mateo); Stevens, Martha (ISSAtlanta); document
Subject: RE: science fair
That’s funny. Everything I know about hacking I learned here:http://www.chestnet.org/health.science.policy/patient.education.guides/cough.pted.html
Best of luck with your science project, whichever route you take. And don’t throw your underwear on the stage at the N’sync concert.

Economists who work on things like child care don’t generally get the big jobs at Harvard and the Fed. Some of them do it anyway, but they still are required to talk about it only in the purest business-guy dialect. (Can we call it Avarese?) For some reason, “We’re going to wake up one day and find out that unless we take care of our child-care business, we’re not going to have a sustainable, growing economy'’ gets more attention than, say, “Kids need a safe, fun place to be while their parents are out doing what they have to do.”

And from Elizabeth, back in the Minnesota homeland, this exhausting report:We had the most amazing summer. The girls and I were outside nearly every minute, swimming, kayaking, canoeing, motorboating, horseback riding, frog/crayfish/minnow catching, grilling, swimming, camping, relaxing in the hammock, playing t-ball and softball, and of course, swimming. We found a fantastic beach about half an hour from the cabins we were renting and couldn’t get enough of it. Heradio stayed home a few of the weekends working on the house, but really enjoyed the cabin too. (His indoor bathroom needs were met and all was well.) The most amazing part is that we were out of town seven times and had beautiful weather each time. I finished typing that with some apprehension as the girls and I are going to camp on Lake Superior with my dad and Les and Mike this last weekend (our last summer fling), and now the weather gods will be angered and wreak havoc upon us. I don’t know how we will all adjust to sitting in school next week, but I started my teacher-speak meetings today and survived the rehashing of school improvement goals. Well, time for me to head to bed — I can paddle a canoe for four hours and run an outboard motor for two, but my tendonitis flares up at the mere sight of THE MOUSE. Luckily for me, my job consists mostly of blah-blah-blah the old fashioned way — by mouth. — Elizabeth

Mary had the idea of asking a bunch of friends to write down how their first day of kindergarten went. (See August 28 entry below.) Rachel came up with this. (Very lightly edited by me.) Thanks, Rachel.

I woke up and went to Jerry’s bed (now there’s a switch) when I heard him rustle. He said, “What are you doing here? Why are you up?” I wanted to tell him that I was up because this was the morning of his first day of kindergarten and it was a very special and important day and I wanted to look at him long and hard and see his face and remember it forever and hoped he was OK at school and tell him I’d be thinking of him every minute for six hours while he was gone. Instead, I said, “I don’t know. I just woke up and thought I’d come in.”Tony got up a few minutes later and called, “Jerry, want to shave with me?” I’d heard this before, but I figured it meant that Jerry would hang around in the bathroom and keep Tony company while he did his apres-shower grooming. Jerry said, “Bye, Mom. I have to shave with Dad now,” and he went into the bathroom. I heard their voices from the bathroom and went back in our room to get my slippers and a sweatshirt. I decided to go down stairs to make the coffee, but I took a peek into the bathroom before I went down. What I saw: a slim yet muscled boy (a tuft of independent hair sticking straight up from the crown of his head) wearing white Jockey boxers, and a man, with not much hair on his head but the very familiar shape of his appealing form, in his white Jockey boxers. Both stood facing the large mirror, faces at approximately the same height, Jerry on the stool, Tony on the floor. Both left hands assisted, both right hands moved shavers, making tracks in the shave cream mask on their faces. Though their backs were to me and they didn’t notice me, I could see both faces in the mirror. The only difference, as they stood focusing on the serious task at hand, was the shaving cream on Jerry’s forehead (Tony’s forehead was free of cream) and the cover on Jerry’s blade. Neither of them spoke. The act had the easy rhythm of a comfortable ritual performed many times before.It was a shared moment that I could have broken with a comment. I slipped downstairs undetected and realized how little he, the stealer of my heart, the whirling dervish, the origin of so many of my grins and laughter lately, my five year old boy, needed me. I could never shave with him. I was profoundly glad that Jerry had a dad, had this Dad.When Tony and I walked Jerry to school that morning, and left him in the assembly outside standing with classmates in little lines behind respective teachers like ducklings behind mother ducks, it was Tony whose eye got wet at the letting go of him. Tony and Jerry hugged and his line started moving towards the school. We waved good-bye and watched him and the other kindergarteners file orderly into the big old building, class by class.When I saw Tony’s tears, I realized I’d been saying good-bye to Jerry for a long time, three years every morning as I dropped him off at preschool. Tony and Jerry were separated again, like other mornings, but this time, the mark of kindergarten lent a formality and overtness in the departure that it lacked on other days. The growing up of him and the letting go of us was painful for both of us. To Jerry the new day seemed like any other new thing he experiences in his little life. Everything is new. And all of it is taken in stride. Not so for the grownups. A new beginning, again. — Rachel