gathering

A difference of opinion

Take the amazing cinematography first seen in the tremendous Planet Earth television series, write an overwrought, cloying script which anthropomorphizes the heck out of a large segment of the animal kingdom, create fictional stories that pair up innocent victims with amoral hunters,  shake James Earl Jones out of a narcoleptic fit to  read the script and then set it all to the most banal, soul-sucking musical score imagainable and what do you have?  Well, here is where the difference of opinion comes. I say you have a steaming pile of  nature-porn crap; Disney calls it "Earth, the movie."   Coming to a theater near you April 22.  That's Earth Day. Do yourself - and the planet - a favor. Skip the film.

Do you tweet? I tweet.

I've begun tweeting on Twitter. Look for me @malcolmmw

Print

I grew up around newsprint. My family’s business in Northern Ireland was what was called a newsagent – a small storefront selling mostly newspapers and magazines. I remember my Uncle Adrian, and before him my mother’s Aunt Daida and Uncle Harry, sorting newspapers in the cramped back room. Adrian was always ink stained, with blackened fingers and dress shirts.

The shop had regular customers. People who stepped into the tiny store daily or weekly or monthly to get their papers and magazines and to read stories. For that was mostly what the publications offered. Pictures and illustrations, sure, but mostly words, words which told stories, words which attempted to make sense of the world, words around which men and women and children built community.

My first job in this profession was in a newspaper composition room, pasting waxed columns of words onto pages, cutting apart lines to fit the space available, literally editing the stories to fit. I’d smell of wax and ink and chemicals when I got home. 

Wax, of course, is long gone from composition rooms. Modern inks don’t rub off as easily. And newsprint is a dinosaur, we’re told. Information is electric now - a micropulse of energy that can carry all of the day’s news through the air. The news cycle isn’t monthly or weekly or even daily. It is constant and ongoing.

This is the information age and newspapers, with their stories and their ink and their newsprint, are a clumsy transport vehicle for digital information. I can record videos on my cell phone and upload them to the web in seconds. I can post a question on Facebook tonight and wake to dozens of answers in the morning. 

I chat online with my uncle, back in Northern Ireland. He is retired. The newsagents shop closed years ago. For awhile, the space was occupied by a photography processing business, but that, too was a dinosaur, on its last legs. No one uses film anymore.

And no one has time for stories. We’re too busy telling our own. We Google. We Facebook. We text and tweet. I am thinking about dinner. I am happy it is warming up. LOL. 

Instead of a daily paper - a digest of events that guided us through our days - we swim in an ocean of data, treading water in this roiling, crazy sea of big and small stories. But how do we navigate? 

When my family came to America we journeyed by ocean liner. I remember little of the trip. I was seasick for most of it. But the scent of fresh baked bread immediately carries me back to that ship, to the immense dining hall and the dinner rolls I finally felt well enough to eat after several days of nausea. One sniff, and I am on the open sea, the night sky inseparable from the water, the horizon imperceptible, yet safe and protected.

It is a nostalgic aroma.

Like newsprint. 

Neglected city

Ronald Reagan, in a speech long ago, referred to the United States as the shining city on a hill, a beacon of freedom and democracy that shone so brightly over the rest of the world. That was back in the late '80s, when communism and totalitarian regimes were collapsing and it truly seemed that the power of democracy (and capitalism) was triumphing.

Fast forward to the present.

Our country has been engaged in a war for 7 years, the result of the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive invasion. It is a mis-directed war, as the terrorists responsible for 9/11 remain at large in another country. Further, that war and our aggressive militant, attitudes have fostered and nourished a vibrant anti-American sentiment across the globe.

Moreover, we hold thousands of enemy prisoners in makeshift prisons around the world. In blatant disregard of the Geneva Convention, the Bush administration has advocated and authorized their torture, placing our own soldiers in greater jeopardy where ever they patrol today.

We have ignored the Kyoto Protocol aimed at controlling greenhouse gas emissions and censored our own scientists when they have reported on the reality of climate change and man's role in enhancing it.

We have dallied about Darfur, largely abandoned the front in Afghanistan.

We no longer hold the moral high ground. Reagan's city is dark and neglected. That shining beacon he spoke of has been dimmed by nearly 8 years of cavalier decisions and bad judgments.

Whether you are Republican or Democrat or Independent, can you consider these past 8 years a success in any way? We arrive at this time and place burdened, shouldering a staggering debt – of money owed, of trade imbalances, of environmental degradation, of dead and wounded soldiers.

But there is one candidate, who, by his election alone, would send a clarion signal to the rest of the world, that times have changed, that the course of this great ship of democracy has been muscled to a new path. Can you imagine – in the plains of South America, the high hills of the Himalayas, the streets of eastern Europe, the savannah of Africa, the sands of the Mideast and in each and every corner and overlooked place in this world – can you imagine what message it would send to the people in all of those places, if a black man by the name of Barack Obama was elected president?

I can.

I imagine a beacon lit once again.

I picture a bright shining city on a hill – and men and women and children throughout the world once again looking to this city – with hope in the place of hate.

I see the future.

CBS Evening News

First Sarah Palin, now this

Astronomers say they have discovered pieces of the known universe moving in one direction at very high speeds, seemingly under the pull of "something" outside of the observable, known universe.
SPACE.com -- Mysterious New 'Dark Flow' Discovered in Space.
The most popular current theories of astrophysics can't explain this movement, which is not in line with the known expansion of the universe. Some massive object, or objects, the researchers speculate, perhaps hundreds of billions of light years away, seems to be pulling at these pieces of the universe.
The implications are manifold: a much older universe than previously thought, or things that travel considerably faster than the speed of light, or multiple universes, or ... well, no one knows.
The article notes that some scientists are calling this movement the "dark flow." Hmmm, sounds suspiciously like the "dark side" to me. Heck, something that could move whole pieces of he universe would be a sizable weapon. It would make the Death Star look like a child's toy - and make Sarah Palin look a lot like, well, Tina Fey.

Send Palin back to Alaska

This woman cannot become our second in command.
Here's a transcript from Sarah Palin's interview with Katie Couric (only the second interview she's done since becoming McCain's pick for vp). In today's segment, she repudiates the foreign policy advice of Henry Kissinger and Colin Powell all at once, calling them naive. Ah, the irony of it all.

Couric: You met yesterday with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who is for direct diplomacy with both Iran and Syria. Do you believe the U.S. should negotiate with leaders like President Assad and Ahmadinejad?

Palin: I think, with Ahmadinejad, personally, he is not one to negotiate with. You can't just sit down with him with no preconditions being met. Barack Obama is so off-base in his proclamation that he would meet with some of these leaders around our world who would seek to destroy America and that, and without preconditions being met. That's beyond naïve. And it's beyond bad judgment.

Couric: Are you saying Henry Kissinger ...

Palin: It's dangerous.

Couric: ... is naïve for supporting that?

Palin: I've never heard Henry Kissinger say, "Yeah, I'll meet with these leaders without preconditions being met." Diplomacy is about doing a lot of background work first and shoring up allies and positions and figuring out what sanctions perhaps could be implemented if things weren't gonna go right. That's part of diplomacy.

No real pies were harmed

I got a letter at work this week I have to share with you.
An Exchange magazine reader very upset about the pie fight. "What a waste of time, money and energy...Hope you can both come up with a better idea as you mature... Help in a soup kitchen..."
Well, no real pies were used. No food was wasted. Most of the "pies" were plates with shaving foam. Some special ones contained chocolate cream filling donated by a local bakery which would have toosed the filling as it had expired.
And, oh yes, we raised $800 for charity.
And, 125 people laughed their asses off for half an hour, with many of our friends telling us after that it may have been the most fun they had ever had.
Which is one of the reasons, I think, the pie fight became an international story. The other is the fact that my friend Dan and I have maintained a friendship for 32 years and have honored this long-ago made promise.
I wondered if it would be snarky to suggest that this letter writer could benefit from a pie in the face, but really, we all could.
For more follow-up to the pie fight, go to the pie fight Web site.

The pie fight video

Live TV : Ustream

The pie fight update

Columnist Jim Stingl wrote an article about the pie fight in Sunday's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Read it here  These 50-year-olds aren't too mature to throw pie. On Monday, the story went national when Jim Romenesko picked up the column on his Obscure Store site.  Check it out here  Obscure Store