Gather ye bicycles while ye may

I got the mountain bike back on the road. Shakedown cruise revealed the usual  inventory of required tweaks. Headset is a trifle too loose, rear brake cable needs to be tighter. However the main event--the new rear wheel and gear cluster--are working well. I bought the wheel with a bolt-on axle, intending to replace it with a quick-release. That comes later: the quick release I had available has seen better days.

Non-cyclists can wake up now. The question will be whether the media will have run all bicycles off the road by the end of this week's "objective" coverage of sharing the road . The week seems to be shaping up as "trash cyclists" week under the guise of balanced reporting. My opinion of  Greater Boston has been vile since April 15. They're turning the whole week onto this topic and I expect little or nothing in the way of objective coverage. The local media up heah are doing this too.

By the time they're all done, I fully expect to have SWAT teams breaking down my door and bomb squads taking my bikes off for "examination." I've seen some balanced reporting on this subject before. By the time they're done, you'll need to hail a cab to cross the street,  because the balanced reporters will make one thing clear: The road is for no less than four wheels. As I said, I admit my current bias against Greater Boston. I wonder if the host will admit hers?

If we could be objective, I have a contribution to make. I was driving through downtown Salem at lunchtime last week. As a woman stepped out of a restaurant, she was nearly (by nearly I mean inches) run down by a cyclist: on the busy sidewalk, cruising at maybe 12 mph, wearing noise-deadening headphones. He didn't appear to apologise; in fact, he hardly acknowledged the woman's existence.

It's hard to know where to begin critiquing an asshole like this. I just know where I wouldn't begin, and that is to damn all cyclists and keep all of them off the road, but that's exactly what I expect to hear during a week of supposedly objective bike reporting.

Wake me when it's over, and let me know if I should bury the bikes.

What curiosity got the cat

One of the surgeons working on the wounded of the Marathon bombing told the media that they were removing "ball bearings...2mm to 3mm diameter" from many of the wounded. Since curiosity isn't the strong suit of contemporary media, especially of the broadcast variety, "ball bearing" became the trope of choice to describe one of the ingredients in these two nasty bombs.

However, I'm afflicted with both curiosity and skepticism. I'm also a recreational cyclist trying to keep machines over 20 years old on the road. As a result I know something about the bearing market. In which it is damn hard to find loose ball bearings of any size; caged and roller bearings have been the norm for most of the 20-odd years since my bikes were built. It's especially hard to find small ones of steel. The few that are out there are ceramic, not steel. Bulk steel ball bearings fall more in the line of antique dealers than mechanics.

A reasonable person should not expect ER surgeons to be up to speed on such mechanical detail. They have enough to do to keep up with their own mechanics. Therefore a reasonable person paid to ask questions might ask if these pellets were truly ball bearings. That reasonable person would notice that while loose steel ball bearings have become scarce over the past 20 years, steel birdshot has become common, relatively cheap, and easily purchased in bulk. (This happened when the use of lead shot on waterfowl was proscribed for environmental reasons.) Because many hunters reload their own ammunition, the component parts of a shotgun shell are widely available. 

The projectiles described by this ER surgeon fit the description of #4, #5 or #6 birdshot, available in steel for $15-$20 for a 10 pound bag. That's not much more expensive per pound than the nails also used in the bombs. Depending on the variety, the gunpowder used in these devices is around $15-$20 per pound and available from the same sources in lots ranging (in my search) up to eight pounds: to anybody. Eight pounds is a lot of gunpowder.

My curiosity stops short of trying to search for the purported bomb-making sites: instinct says this is not the time to go prowling around them, so I don't know exactly how much of each ingredient they are supposed to hold. The component figures raise a point. A large part of the "evidence" advanced by talking heads is that these two putzes could not possibly afford the components; therefore they must have had external support. The same sources point to "no visible means of support."

Pardon me, but they had family and one had a wife. They may have been supported by family and one hopes the police will investigate that, even if it doesn't occur to pundits with an ax to grind. Two young men, supported by families, spreading out their purchases, could certainly afford a bomb's raw materials at these prices.

Washington Republicans and the gun lobby are trying to use the bombing as a way to reinforce their argument that stiffer gun laws won't prevent tragedies. Well, if two of the principal components of the bombs are available in bulk to recreational firearms users, then this event most certainly crosses into territory in which reasonable regulation would make a wicked big difference.  Sensible gun control also means bomb control.           

This is what its supposed to look like

Never mind the controversy: this is what a journalist should be doing in times of crisis. This is the work of a photojournalist, of course, but their craft shows vividly what anyone in the field should be after: capturing and conveying the immediacy of the moment, ideally with the hope that someone, somewhere, may actually learn something. That hope may often be pretty deeply buried, but it ought to be there.

However, like many photos, this one is somewhat dependent on its descriptions, in this case the adjective "terrified." Small children are easily frightened. That's a universal survival skill among mammals that helps ensure there will be more mammals. What if the description told us that a child who fell on the sidewalk is being comforted by an adult? In that respect, the legendary news photos cited at the link above may be journalistically superior to Bill Hoenk's effort. They convey the horror of their moment independent of any description or caption. The context and witnesses will surely keep this photo from swinging into controversy like that  surrounding Robert Capa's Moment of Death photo. Still, it's pretty impressive.

Hoenk was a rarity that day, because he was doing his job well. He was not turning rescuer. He was not panicking on air. He was not indulging in the wildest of speculations live. He, and a handful of other photo and video journalists showed the world what was really happening at the Marathon, and thus deserve thanks and praise. If their work scares you, there are clearly many others in the media happy to indulge your tastes.

Riddle me this, and this, and this...

Yesterday's Marathon bombing news (4/17/13) made the day-of coverage look rational by contrast. The escalation of the information that the image of a suspect had been identified to "an arrest has been made and the perp will immediately be arraigned" took, what, an hour and a half?  It resembled the game of gossip more than news gathering. The de-escalation took the rest of the day. No one likes to admit they've made themselves look stupid, and media on the scene at the Federal Courthouse hadn't let go of the story when I gave up in disgust in mid-evening. Not even Gov Deval Patrick's beautifully crafted, smiling putdowns discouraged them.

At one point, near the end of this, I found a "story" by an online "journalist" which stubbornly stood pat. His source? A friend had overheard a BPD person saying (to whom?) that law enforcement had identified a man stuffing bags into trash cans. This sourcing is right out of the urban legend playbook. He claimed to have a confirmation from another, unidentified law enforcement source. Was this a statement, or did someone else overhear?

Christ wept: this is journalism?

I need hardly say that the alleged description of the suspect/detainee what-have-you varied with the political colouration of the news source. The further right the source, the darker the skin of the suspect.

Meanwhile, I do have a couple of questions unanswered in all the noise. Certainly there was security and vigilance, but a couple of gaps present themselves.

The dangers of explosive devices in backpacks have been known in Europe for over 30 years. Back ca. 1990, in the UK for example, if one left one's bags on a seat in a Tube station to look at a kiosk ten feet away, they'd be gone by the time one turned around.  However, we're told that at the Boston Marathon, runners are able to leave backpacks, or have friends leave backpacks, just about anywhere in the vicinity of the finish. At best, this seems rather a haphazard arrangement. I understand there is a bag check for registered runners, so I wonder if the alleged scattering of bags belong to unregistered runners. Of course, one must leave open the possibility that this is yet another fabrication.

The BAA already frowns upon unregistered runners, to be sure,  and if loose bags belong to the latter, it's another strike against them. Still, if they've used their ingenuity to get in the race, is it such a stretch to use a little more to stow a bag in a safe place?

Observation. Since 9/11, the MBTA has supposedly ratcheted up security and conducted random bag checks and related searches. I ride the T pretty often, and in eleven-plus years I've been through bag checks twice. Security seems honoured more in the breach than the observance unless some specific threat is in the air. A clever local must certainly have noticed this.

I direct a simple rant at another bit of slovenly American media "thinking." It does no service to persist in labeling paranoid ramblings as "conspiracy theories." To label any of this drivel a theory is to give it a credence which it never has and does not deserve. The word implies a level of rationalism which is uniformly absent from any such crap.

Today, we learn that Elvis sent ricin to Washington, and that a Texas fertiliser factory has blown up. Even though the evidence so far points strongly toward industrial accident, we find no one in the media willing to let go of the alternative explanation.* Imagine what they may do with a tornado or a mining accident.

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*I will await the evidence. However, my work experience indicates that in Texas, enforcement of workplace safety seems considered an infringement of the owners' liberties. Two plus two is what?

A new spin on yellow journalism

Back again. Blame the absence on the Beast, because I've grown tired of documenting it, especially when I've found out that people with no dog in that fight feel obliged to say that TN patients are exaggerating. 

So I return to one of my standard topics, the disgraceful performance of contemporary news media in times of emergency: in this case, the explosions at the Boston Marathon finish line.

We shall not pass lightly over the embarrassing overreaction by Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis and by most of the area news media to a fire at the JFK library. It happened soon after the explosions and people with the jitters conflated the two incidents. Props to The Examiner, which has forthrightly admitted that there never was a bomb. Also to NECN News, which had the sense to send a mobile unit to the library when they couldn't get into the Back Bay. They covered it as a fire nearly from the beginning.

The next favourite story is that "other devices" were found in the vicinity. Were they? We have one official statement which stays alive as news, from later yesterday, to that effect. By the time I went to bed, there was a lonely statement that said "maybe not." This morning, everything but the original speculation on speculation seems to have vanished from the news cycle.*

Inevitably, every talking head drew comparisons with 9/11, even though there are hardly any except that a bunch of people, including a bunch of media, who were not victims talked themselves into a frenzy of fear. There is a real parallel, the Olympic Park bombings in Atlanta in 1996: real in the MO, real in the casualty figures, real in the absence of a claim of responsibility, real in the similarity of venues.  It may even become more real if the law goes after a scapegoat and lets the actual perp go free for years afterward. After 17 years of the nonstop news cycle, it may be that law enforcement has given up on studying parallel cases and surrendered to the sound bite.

It is understandable that journalists who find themselves in proximity to a disaster whilst covering something else should be rattled: most people are.  However, one of the considerations that is supposed to make journalism a profession is the ability to rise above fear and horror until one finishes the story, when one can break down in private. That feature of professionalism was conspicuous by its absence among most journalists close to the event. We start with the local Fox News channel, which began broadcasting "we are under attack" as soon as the first rumour about the JFK Library surfaced.  Only one channel, WBZ, the local CBS outlet, was actually there. They began well, having an exclusive, then coverage began to break down under the press of events. They of all people should have been filtering official statements and pressing the authorities on statements that now appear unfounded. Worse, some of the crew committed a cardinal sin of journalism: they stopped covering the event and became involved in the rescue effort. It's a human reaction, but experience shows that quality of coverage suffers.

Having some personal interest in real information, we surfed through unsatisfactory coverage by absent media until we turned with hope to PBS. Alas, even the News Hour turned out to be slightly tainted by the speculative germ.  Nor did it help when they broadcast an interview with Boston City Councilor Steve Murphy. Now, I'm a Murphy maternally, so I appreciate the desire to tell a good story that runs in the gene pool. The lad's eyewitness account gathered steam and detail with each telling. However, only someone who has never before seen an explosion could have called either a "mushroom cloud." (Now there's a sound bite!)

Unfortunately, PBS coverage hit a low moment with the generally reliable news commentary of Greater Boston. Host Emily Rooney lives near the finish line but was not there for the explosion: close enough to be jumpy, though. She assembled a guest list of media (and the omnipresent Steve Murphy), most of whom were eyewitnesses to the explosion. Rooney would have done better to surrender the chair to someone who was not directly involved in the event, someone who could have shown some journalistic detachment. Instead, she and her guests reinforced each others' fears. By the end of the show, Murphy had added "fireball" to "mushroom cloud." A couple of guests, who had seen the worst, seemed close to hysteria. All of them had looked into the future and decided that Boston would never again have a public event. Clearly, no one was buying into "Keep calm and carry on." That's unfortunate, because Boston will need doses of that for some time.  Although a couple of the guests had attempted to get interviews on the scene, by the time they taped the programme everyone was a witness and no one was a journalist.

I understand horrors, having seen a few myself. But if one professes to be a journalist, one has three choices: put a cork in it and cover the facts, direct one's anxieties into the story by letting the words speak, or shutting up until one has command of one's emotions.

Overall,  event coverage for April 15 rates a D. My expectations for some days to come are no better.

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* Late news, and thanks to NECN again: Statement from Gov. Patrick that there were only two devices. Once again,  rumour goes around the world before truth gets its pants on.

One thing that needs fixing

At each Presidential inauguration, we are--or should be--reminded that a peaceful transfer of political power is a rarity amongst living things. That used to be the focus of inauguration coverage.

Not now. Did Sasha yawn? Did Schumer upstage the President? Did Michelle roll her eyes at Boehner? Did anyone muff their lines during the swearing in? Did this? Did that?  Did some other damned piece of transient nonsense happen?

Jaazus H. Christ! This is journalism? This is tripe. One hears a lot today about the people getting the representation they deserve, because they're the ones who voted the Congressional ship of fools into office. Maybe so, but the people's decisions can be no better than  the information they receive from a free media.

If inauguration coverage is any measure, most of the people get no information at all, only cheap entertainment tarted up as journalism. I don't know why the average broadcast journalist doesn't learn to juggle or do stupid dog tricks: that would add breadth and dimension to what they have the gall to call news coverage.

Repeated grumps

Readers know that I am no friend of the stew of verbal shorthand and intellectual laziness that infects most America media. Witness my losing battle against the term "NOR-easter." My vexation du jour is bullet. Here is an example of the potential of media to educate, a potential which is consistently disregarded. A bullet, by itself, is just a lump of metal or metals. But spread the word? Lord no.

I think the answer to both of these irritations is to return to the days when reporters were paid by the line instead of the meme. How easy then it would be to get them to say or write "cartridge" if that were the case. Likewise, we could expect the name of that there storm to get its "th" back.

Speaking of things missing. Either the coverage of New York's strict new gun control law seems to fall short, or the law itself has. Is it true that mental health practitioners must report any statement by a patient that involves gun violence? We're left to ask, well, suppose the patient threatens to set off a bomb? Or to drive a car down a crowded sidewalk? Or to hijack an airplane and fly it into a building? Is it OK not to report those? If true, don't doubt for a minute that psychiatric professionals, who don't want to cooperate with disclosure, will leap on such exceptions to excuse their actions.

If my speculations are unfounded, then why the fuck has no one reported the whole story?  It's the "noreaster" mentality, or absence of mentality. Nobody cares about anything but gun control, so why bother with all the facts?

As usual, I'll have to go scratch it out for myself.

Due to lack of interest...

The Yosemite chronicles are indefinitely postponed. After half a dozen posts without a pixel of interest, I have to think either the topic really is boring or I've lost my touch as a writer. So onward to other thoughts.

During that recent trip, Em expressed dismay at a news poll indicating a large percentage of  "people over 65" support Romney and the policies of the Romney-Ryan ticket. She seized on me as the nearest and most accessible representative of people over 65. My response was lame, and we got stuck on one of my favourite arguments: there are many more stupid people than smart people, and becoming older doesn't make you smarter. Therefore, stupid young people become stupid old people, if their stupidity doesn't kill them prematurely.

I'm groping toward a broader explanation. One dimension of this is that "over 65" as a dividing point would already be irrelevant if the more simple-minded form of journalist didn't insist on hanging so many stories on the same old hook. Age 65 is the a default retirement age, based on its initial use by Social Security, only if you're 75 or older. That transition has been going on for nearly a generation, a detail the shallow end of the news pool has long overlooked. I know and like a good many people 75 or older but I don't feel an automatic unanimity of interest with them. More, I can sense a different worldview among people only three or four years older than I.

I think easily of several such people who were college seniors when I was a freshman. They were away, out in the world in one fashion or another, when the maelstrom of social change we lazily call "the Sixties" burst upon the country. Some people change their values with changing times, but most I think do not. I find that people aged 68 to 74 are more likely to share  weltanschauung than people  bridging that dated 65 threshold. Having been around when those older values were common currency, I can't be surprised when those values include such things as sexism, racism, and McCarthyesque  Red Scare paranoia. I suggest those are the building blocks of what passes for thought among American reactionaries. The pressure of later ideas may have sanded the rough edges off those views in some cases, but their shape remains evident.

If we are a stew of nature and nurture, we must include the influence of our times under nurture. What we do with those threads is what differs.

Yo Ho or not Yo Ho

Crikey, we haven't even left yet and I'm ranting.

Read, very carefully, this article about the hantavirus issues in Yosemite. Then look at the pretty picture.

The tent cabins in the picture aren't the new ones cited in the article, in between the new and breathlessly panicked statements from the Centers for Disease Control. The new ones, which are connected by evidence with hantavirus, are built more like houses, with inner and outer sheathing, creating nice homes for mice.* The old ones, in the picture, built like the GAR encampments of a century ago, have only outer sheathing and no shelter for mice. The Tuolumne Meadows tent cabins are actual tents, over steel frames, on concrete slabs.

But let's tar everything with the same brush, shall we? Let's succumb to the curse of the file photo and run something that is sort of like the affected units, instead of putting someone on the scene to take pictures of exactly the housing that is connected by evidence to the outbreak. While we're at it, let's also succumb to "if it bleeds, it leads" and not trouble ourselves with facts any more than we can help.

We were, and still are, going to Yosemite. It took some fast talking on my part, as the only family member with an acquired immunity to this dangerous outbreak of media-induced panic. I ran the numbers: at this moment one chance in two million of acquiring hantavirus if one is a Yosemite visitor who has not been in the affected tent cabins. I influenced my daughter to exercise some clinical due diligence, bone up on the epidemiology, and consider the risks after disclosure and countermeasures, against the risks she ran in numerous Yosemite visits before the hantavirus was noted. In a lax moment my spouse left the go or no-go decision in the family medical hands.

I never had to use my trump card: If I went out and bought lottery tickets with those odds with the same money we've already spent on this trip, they'd put me away.

Nevertheless it was a near-run thing. Not because there was any evidence-based risk: one chance in two million of death. Fear, even among thinking people, spread chiefly because journalism is dead to its changed impact in a digital age. In a time when a fake report of a celebrity death can circle the earth in five minutes, a report of disease in Yosemite, however slim the odds, will generate panic far out of proportion to the risk.

When Em confirmed our reservations, she noted that the park accommodations, normally full up in September, had developed numerous vacancies. If that's the worst that happens, fine. But how long will it be before this excuse for news is equated with shouting fire in a crowded theatre?

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* There is something piquant in the idea that Curry Village's 90 new up-market "tents," presumably made to defend occupants from the great outdoors, turned into incubators for a heretofore obscure virus.

Le Grande Tour

Back in the less-inhibited 1960s and 1970s, my town was the terminus of an event called The Great Race. It originated in a bar bet, considering whether one could go from Watertown to Marblehead, solely under human power, faster by land or by water. Sobriety was a secondary consideration. In a remarkably short time for those benighted, pre-Interwebz days, the bet morphed into a full-scale event with thousands of participants and spectators. Modes of transport were freestyle, ranging from racing bikes and kayaks to three-decker bikes and four-abreast paddleboats...and not a liability lawyer in sight.

The Great Race had one fundamental rule. Whoever came in first was assumed to have cheated and was forthwith disqualified. The next finisher, in turn, was disqualified for the same reason, and the next, and the next. When all was over, nobody had won first place, but everyone had a place at the taps: and, presumably, such other elevating substances as the times provided. After several years, liability lawyers had been invented and the anal retentives shut the party down.

Today on CBS This Morning, I was listening to Charlie Rose interview Peter Flax, editor in chief of Bicycling magazine, about Lance Armstrong's de facto plea of nolo contendere to the USADA's doping charges. Of course, it remains to be seen how the French organisers of the Tour de France respond to the decision of an American anti-doping agency to strip Armstrong of his several French yellow jerseys. (Logic goes under the bus at such moments, but I hope the jerseys have stood up in the wash.) However, Flax pointed out another problem: just who gets the recycled jerseys? In the years since Armstrong won his Tours, each of the second-place finishers has been found liable for doping. Each of the third place finishers have also, and so on.

Inevitably, I was reminded of The Great Race, and I concluded at once that its organisers had a much better idea than the stuffed shirts who hand out yellow jerseys. Infamous, indeed! If nobody wins, we're all losers, so, let's party!

The idea behind banning doping was not moral, beyond the universal principle behind sports rules, that no one should have an unfair advantage. But if everyone was (or is) doping, and everyone doping is, in theory, going to be caught and punished, doesn't that mean the people with the unfair advantage are the ones who aren't doping? They may win the yellow jersey, but they won't get a shot at the kegs.

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Most of the local media coverage of the Armstrong announcement was fatuous in the extreme. It seemed to be based on the assumption that no American was riding a bicycle except under the inspiration of Lance Armstrong, and thus all of them would go away if Lance is banned. Look, I own two road bikes that were built before Armstrong could drive. One was built before he entered kindergarten. I ride because I love to ride, not because I'm under the influence of celebrity culture. So stuff that angle away and go find some news.

Enablers

One of the troubling things about the country these past 20 years has been the predominance of enablers in the media. No matter how dangerous, bigoted or vile your position is, you'll be able to find some so-called journalism to approve of what you say and do. These enablers are cowards at heart: witness how Rush Limbaugh retreats to his "I'm an entertainer" citadel whenever someone acts on what sounds a lot like his advice, or when his act crosses a line.

Kevin Paul Dupont could profit from this example. If you don't read the Globe sports pages, you miss his column. He is an admitted--proud, even--hater of bicyclists. (Much of the year, he covers hockey, by the way: make of that what you will.) Being in the sports pages perhaps assures him of an audience--one whose collective knuckles drag when they walk, but an audience all the same.

Let us take his July 1, 2012 column as our text for today. (Note: you may need a subscription to read this.) To the extent that any print rant can be said to contain arguments, this column seems to argue that:

• Kids today don't ride bicycles
• Therefore adults shouldn't; adult cyclists shouldn't inconvenience people who drive machines that weigh 100 times more than childish bicycles
• Since all Dupont ever sees are groups of cyclists in bright costumes, that must be all of them, and they must have some comical objective, like riding in the Tour de France

Let's parse these points.

First, in many places, we see fewer children on bicycles because we see fewer children doing anything independent. His nostalgic recollection of about 55 years ago goes back to the time when riding bikes was basic training for driving. I see no evidence that lack of such childhood training has improved anything on the roads.

If kids don't ride bikes but, instead, adults take it up de novo, doesn't that rather ruin the argument that cycling is a childish pastime? So are baseball and hockey, a thought which is close to heresy in the Sports pages.

Dupont's third point takes us back to the Ballantine hypothesis. One cyclist, especially in street clothes, is invisible. Same goes for one motorcyclist. Ten cyclists in bright colours, riding in close formation, are not only visible but present a challenge to narrow minds in cars. Dupont sees no other cyclists but road bikers en peleton because all the others are invisible--to him, and to everyone who doesn't want to share with anything having fewer than four wheels. What's scary is that those invisible cyclists probably include children. (Remember, his entire argument that kids don't ride bikes rests on a single slender sampling.)

Coming to this insight, I have to revise my previous comment that bicyclists don't have the recourse to intimidation that motorcyclists have. Evidently they do, at least to the heart of a bike hater. For any two-wheeled vehicle there is safety in numbers. The bicycle can't generate loud enough noise to call attention to itself, but its rider can resort to loud colours and bright lights to achieve the same end. Another Ballantine observation is that an urban cyclist should be decked out like a Christmas tree. It's not comical at all: it's survival.

I have little doubt that most bike haters are also anti-motorcycle. But they can't say so in public, lest the Hell's Angels show up at the front door to express their feelings. It seems safer to them to attack the smaller number of perceived outsiders on the weaker vehicle, a group the hater perceives as comical and defenceless.

Dupont comments that he finds bicycles "complicated." This opens the door to yet another possible motivation of bike-haters: jealousy. If one never learnt to ride a bike, one might direct one's anger and frustration at that failure toward those who did learn.

This is probably the point at which Dupont rises up to say that his column was entertainment, not journalism. I agree that it isn't journalism. It is the sort of drivel that most of us have produced under deadline pressure at one time or another. But the Globe, having little that passes for sound editorial judgment, actually prints such copy. The trouble with this form of "entertainment" is that it validates hatred of the more psychotic variety: the type that deliberately grazes or hits cyclists, opens doors in their path, assaults them when they're stopped, runs them off the road, or pulls guns on them. I'm not making those examples up. They've all happened to me or fellow cyclists. No, Kevin, I'm not entertained.

Perhaps, as Harrumpher commented on my last go, bike-hating is a secret handshake of solidarity. If so, what an utter waste. A rational society would direct its outrage at individual offenders on public ways, no matter what vehicle, if any, they use. Applying the same curse equally to one group, and that the least numerous, is nothing but hairy chest-pounding. I don't expect that sort of rationality anytime soon. Kevin, hie thee to a hockey rink.

A bit buggy

PBS news is busy hyping a story about the latest in upscale culinary fashion trends: eating grubs and insects. The News Hour is the chief source of broadcast news in this house. I hope they appreciate the fact that they have an audience in which the critical faculty is turned on.

There's an angle here that PBS hasn't explored. What we hear is "isn't it about time we joined the rest of the world?" However, the rest of the world eats grubs and bugs because people have to. Here, this addition to the food pyramid is chiefly a novelty cuisine for the one percent. At least, it's presented as such. Beyond whatever taste the little critters may have (not much, apparently), there is an odour of hypocrisy here. We don't have any coverage or reflection on the possibility that there are also Americans who eat insects out of necessity. Also, this is all about eating bugs on purpose, and doesn't consider the wee beasties that may be a part of our daily diet by accident.

Let's also consider that certain seafood--crab, lobster and shrimp--are pretty closely related to certain insects. I don't like them, either.

Gullibility et al.

The biggest non-news of this past Saturday was Rick Santorum's sweeping, stunning, choose your hyperbole win in the Kansas caucuses.

Stunning to whom? In the first place, careful observers have noted that caucuses anywhere are the bastard, inbred offspring of a primary systems whose antecedents are equally doubtful. But this is Kansas. Second, one can call it either the buckle of the Bible Belt or a large black hole in the centre of the country. Perhaps the only surprise is that Kansans didn't reject him because he's Catholic. Probably the out-there evangelism of his Catholicism won over anyone still suspicious of the Papists.

Our naive media seem surprised at the win. It isn't a surprise that most of them don't do background any more. But surely someone would have read What's the Matter with Kansas? before they pulled out the over-the-top prose. The only surprise would have been if Santorum didn't win Kansas.

Moving elsewhere, we come to the Republican bleat of the week, asking why liberal slams against the former governor of Alaska and a sitting congressperson from Minnesota haven't generated the same outrage as Rush Limbaugh's multi-day rant against Sandra Fluke. There are several excellent reasons, but one of them comes from Journalism 101. You can say much more about public figures than you can about private citizens without crossing the line into malice and libel. Even then, it's usually helpful to have a bit of evidence before you go over the edge. Sandra Fluke meets the standard of private citizen that I was taught. That Limbaugh went on about her for three days looks malicious indeed. The other two people in play meet the standard of public figure. They both rant. They both say things that are either actionable or idiotic, and their speech is fair game. But when they are mocked for their remarks, they whine.

A couple of generations ago, when people were quicker on the legal trigger than they often are now, Limbaugh would have had much bigger trouble than the loss of sponsors. Consider that Westbrook Pegler, quite as much a ranter as Limbaugh, and just as far right, lost the largest libel action of its time by crossing the line in a very similar fashion, but with a public figure. The radio clown is very lucky.

A small profile in courage

Let us offer a bow to Gabrielle Giffords, who has had the courage to resign from Congress to concentrate on her rehabilitation in the face of a year of media marshmallow fluff. Let us also give her a pass for holding onto a resolve to return to Congress. It will keep her going.

The odds are that she won't. I don't see the long-term effects of traumatic brain injury (TBI) as closely as my daughter, who as a clinician deals with it daily. I just push the paperwork. My kid said once that the hardest part of her job was sitting down with families and explaining that their loved one would very likely never be the same person again. You have to deal with TBI to see past the hype, to understand the odds. A high-calibre bullet in the left hemisphere is a grave injury; today it takes exceptional surgical skills to save the victim of such a wound. Giffords' rehab has done wonders as well, to give her the skills she already has. One must keep trying, of course, but if this is all there is for her, it's far ahead of what many TBI patients can achieve. For me, the party of her successor is secondary just now.

This week we're presented with the full spectrum of TBI expectations. Canadian freestyle skier Sarah Burke has died of her brain injuries. Giffords has achieved an impressive range of skills, including the wisdom to resign from Congress. American competitive snowboarder Kevin Pearce is back on his snowboard.
That's what you can expect. It depends on a host of variables, not the puffery of broadcast journalists.

more bias

The CBS news crawl just told me that the Occupy Movement has cost local taxpayers "an average of" $13 million. How is it we have never heard how much Tea Party demonstrations, which come complete with armed second amendment "defenders" cost local taxpayers?

This doesn't even touch the meaninglessness of the word "average" in this context.

Deja news

More and more, I've noticed that coverage of the Occupy movement is a step into the WABAC machine. Destination is, say 1968. So is the coverage...status quo prejudices and all.

I make almost no exceptions to the observation.* I follow Tom Wolfe in thinking that nearly all media exist to defend the established order. There is a spectrum of sorts. Media that wear their conservatism on their sleeve (q.v. Fox and the Boston Herald) are obvious in their contempt for Occupy's challenge and its people. (The Tea Party, of course, has been exempt from such negativity.) Centrist and left-leaning enterprises have been more guilty of benign neglect of the story, and to some extent of retailing stereotypes of protest.

We'll see what happens. It is a world where McLuhan's observation has been eclipsed. The medium now is all. On the other hand, it's a world where the rage of the people has, in the past year, shown a promising capacity for outrunning and embarrassing the media's cultural strictures. That is the newer phenomenon and my money's on the new.

* I followed a Facebook link to a Mother Jones story and got severely stuck in a loop demanding I subscribe. Capitalism has its tentacles eveerywhere.

Was it a bust?

Apparently, Irene was a failure, as viewed from the exalted perch of media anchors, because they themselves are still alive and Wall Street is negotiable by taxi instead of boat.

Bullshit.

In the first place, the death toll is somewhere in the twenties*. Katrina was in a class by itself and warps our sensibilities. Irene's harvest is in the medium range of casualties from tropical storms. The New York media, with their city's limited experience of tropical storms, seem not to appreciate this.

Then there's the physical damage. It may not be impressive to the anchorfolk, but it is if you're in Bennington, Brattleboro, or Woodstock, Vermont, or Campton, NH, Westport, MA, or East Haven, CT, or any similar number of places further south. I mention these because I've been in them and can appreciate the damage. Many of them haven't seen tropical storm damage in over 70 years.

Here in New England, we also have an experience that is becoming normal during and after storms. Hundreds of thousands of customers of private power providers have lost electrical power, and are being told they won't get it back for days, maybe weeks.

By contrast, I live in a town with its own municipal light department. They buy most of our power in good times, but are capable when necessary of generating electricity. Public entity it may be, it has an eye on the bottom line. That may influence the speed with which the local light department responds to outages. The longest outage I can remember in the last 20 years was three hours. Granted, the light department's customer base is a tenth or less the size of that of a private power companies. But shouldn't the private companies' outages be in proportion? If it takes our guys an hour to bring a grid back on line, it should perhaps take private enterprise ten or twelve hours, not ten to twelve days.

So much for the efficiencies of capitalism.

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*As I published this, I heard the toll had risen to 38. No, it's not a bust, especially if you knew one of the victims.

And then, there's the prudes

Throughout adolescence and young adulthood, my daughter was regaled with stories of her infancy and toddlerhood by people who were adults at the time. The tales always came around to what a pain in the arse she was when it came to sleep. She was. For example, my wife worked one night a week, and I had to plan out that evening like a Cook's tour to get her to sleep. Not until she was well up into toddlerhood would she go to sleep for me at all, except in the car. So I planned out car expeditions that left home soon after supper and followed every byway of Essex County, arriving home simultaneously with my wife.

Her former Infant-Toddler teachers told even more harrowing tales of Em's agitation--in the political sense--at nap time. Other babies were quite content to nod off and nap for an hour or two in the afternoon. As far as anyone can remember, Em never napped at all. She could be persuaded at times to lie down, but mostly she sat or stood in the crib and tried to get other kids to wake up and play with her. Sometimes she succeeded, and pandemonium broke loose.

At one point in her acutely sleep-deprived years (from about 14 to 24) she thought about these stories and said "God, what a damn fool I was!" More recently, she took it on herself to make certain that the parental units were aware of the latest thing in parenting lit, Go the F**k to Sleep.* For Em, parenting is a spectator sport, so she finds the book hilarious in the abstract. However, she relates to it very deeply in the context of those tales from her early childhood: as in deeply, hysterically funny.

I suggest this is one in yo face for that species of self-important prude who feels called upon to protest every bit of self-reflective parenting humour. The more insightful and self-revelatory it is, the louder they protest. This is the opinion of a young woman who caused this sort of trouble as a toddler, is delighted about it, and doesn't mind turning things around for a laugh. Most of the critics would find their attitudes proscribed by the Consumer Products Safety Commission were they inanimate objects. Then there's Eric Metaxas, a christian who is garnering some un-christ-like free press for his book. (Forget about that co-author/illustrator person, Nancy Tillman.) Sorry, Eric, parody is protected speech, for one thing: unless you're a christian possessed of a certain level of self-importance. For another, It's Time to Sleep, My Love belongs to a sub-category of children's books that is, to be nice, heavily cross-pollinated.** Others have made the same observations about Nancy Tillman's oeuvre, minus the self-righteousness. One can't parody the genre without engaging in the cross-pollination process.

Tom Wolfe, in The Right Stuff, mercilessly skewered the hypocrisy of the American media about American family life. We see this in the (so far) failed effort to make Go the F**k to Sleep "controversial" instead of funny. Perhaps with that effort running out of gas, Good Morning America has inflated a new prude balloon: young mothers, getting together (terrible!) and having a glass of wine (utter horrors!)

Those even passingly acquainted with my wife know that she drinks about two glasses of wine a week. She may not have much taste for the vine, but she is acutely sensitive to double standards. Why is it, she asked, we haven't heard the same complaint about dads bringing their toddler children to the ballpark and hoisting a few beers?

Lest one buy into the idea that this is the end of civilisation as we know it, consider the good old days about a century ago, as related by my maternal grandmother. Then, similar city occasions meant that mom dragged her brood to the local saloon, got shit-faced, and probably quieted her little darlings by getting them drunk as well. Probably helps explain the life expectancies back then, but it's hypocritical crap to suggest a parallel.

Enough: I'm going the fuck to sleep.

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* I'm not censoring. That's what the f**k it's called.

**Much of childrens' lit is disturbingly derivative, more a lack of imagination or nerve than any case of plagiarism. If you want to read stunningly original kid lit and see what can be done in this genre, I suggest Fernando Krahn's books for children.

Chickens,worms and snakes

Over the past two-plus years of un- or underemployment, I've been astounded by the degree of social regression that these hard times have brought on. This began with the epidemic of "career counselors" infesting the Internet, dispensing the same advice such people have been dispensing for 60 years. Whether for this reason or for others, gradually the worldview of people in business began to regress 50 to 60 years. It is true of employers, workers and unemployed alike. Those who haven't taken part in "self-help" groups for the out-of-work have not fully experienced the timidity, yes, the cowardice, of a large number of those out of work. And what do the "career counselors" do about this? Most of them enable gutlessness.

The item that especially vexes me is the growing mania over "no unemployed need apply" notices in help-wanted ads. This began with a pair of ads for blue-collar or no-collar jobs more than a year ago: right, just two. What may have begun as the aberrant behaviour of a redneck personnel manager then got pumped up by CNN and other media. One can scratch around and find anecdotes of the attitude of this loutish hiring manager and that. When one challenges the panicky unemployed and the enabling counselors to document their claims, they fall quickly back on the heart and soul of the urban legend:
"I heard it from the friend of a friend," or its infinite variations.

Bigotry against the unemployed (and especially the older unemployed) exists among certain people, and always will. To elevate a near-urban legend to this degree aids no one. It enables fear among the fearful, vindicates clueless counselors, and encourages employers to think such bias is a good idea.

Show me. Save these ads. Publish images of them, including the names of the employers and the date of the offending ad. But I forget, don't I? We have relapsed into an era in which the relationship of Dagwood Bumstead and Mr. Dithers has become representative, at least in the minds of too many people out of work. All the same, show me: fear makes repression possible.

When there is no news, send rumors

Our text today was provided 150 years ago by a newspaper editor, who sent the instruction that forms the title to one of his war correspondents.

People today forget that 1860s journalism operated during a time of significant technological change. The telegraph made it possible to obtain information in a few hours that had previously taken a week or more to reach the paper. Although the Atlantic cable laid in 1858 had failed, and would not be restored until war's end, telegraphic connections to easternmost Canada, coupled with steamships, meant that news could come and go from Europe in seven to ten days, instead of three to six weeks. At the same time, the invention of wood pulp paper and machinery to produce it meant that American newspapers could readily cater to a large and increasingly literate audience. Circulation was primary; facts became incidental.

We are now living through a period of similar change, in which the speed and cost advantages are even greater. Being first is again vastly more important than being accurate. Out of many candidates for our attention this week, the leader must be initial coverage of the late violence in Norway. Even before this episode had attracted the inevitable claims of credits, Western media speculated that these must be Islamist terror attacks and presented their speculations as fact. All the while that we were being treated to these rumours, the confessed perp was in custody. Islamist? Home-grown terrorist? Not exactly. Breivik was a person of, shall we say, extreme right-wing views, conflating liberalism and Islamism and seeing mortal threats in both.

Sound familiar? Uh-huh. Those whose attention span is longer than a couple of news cycles may recall the anti-Muslim rants that followed the Oklahoma City bombings in 1995, the embarrassed silence that followed the arrest of Timothy McVeigh, and the obstinate refusal of some talk radio hosts to acknowledge their own complicity in the disaster. As long as noise substitutes for discussion, and as long as the beat beats acuurate information, we'll have more of this, because some people will think the noise is information, not entertainment.