Children – that is, any person age 25 or younger – live in a world so different from the adult world that it could almost be described as a parallel universe.
This is nothing new. It was as true of my generation, in the 1940s, 1950s and into the 1960s, as it is today, except in the matter of degree. I am now 66. When I was 25 and younger, it was popular to say, “Never trust anybody over 30.” Yet we had to live with, and live like, the old fogies, because that is the only kind of living there was.
In America in the 1950s, American post-war mainstream culture, and the companies that marketed to it, was still adult-oriented, and in goods and services, movies and entertainment, the kids wore and watched and listened to the same things as their parents because that’s all there was. It was very much a youth culture that convened at the movies and in the hamburger joint parking lots, but the movie was "Three Coins in the Fountain," and Perry Como, Doris Day, Rosemary Clooney, Eddie Fisher and Patti Page sang practically all of the music coming out of the car radios. In the youth of that era, it set up the sort of angst that began to show up in movies like “Blackboard Jungle,” and “Rebel Without a Cause.”
That all started to change after 1954, with the arrival in the youth awareness of Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry, and with the spread of television. But compared to 2005, the 1950s in America might as well have occurred on another planet. Recently, in the comic strip “Zits,” Jeremy’s mom has asked him to take out the trash. Jeremy, not moving from the couch, says, “Ages 14-25, $94 billion in discretionary spending.” His mom counters by offering to freeze his allowance. In the last panel, Jeremy, dumping the trash in the can, says, “The retail industry respects me more than my parents do.”
That’s not generally true, but it is true in most cases that the retail industry pays at least as much (and frequently more) attention to children than their parents do. The kids are spending the $94 billion on things they want and have been manufactured, created, or organized for them. If parents researched their kids one-tenth as much as the retail industry does, millions of parent-child relationships would change.
In 1954, parents didn’t have to pay attention to what was out there; it was all the same. In 2009, parents can’t keep up with what’s out there, even the ones who try. When my kids were teenagers, I watched MTV regularly, because it was the best way to find out what was going on in my kids’ world. I also tried to watch “The Simpsons.” But I failed. Bart didn’t interest me as entertainment. Neither did MTV, though it was fun to mute the sound and play old Patti Page LPs while Madonna and Aerosmith tore up the screen.
I had it easy. I only had to check in on a few cable channels. Parents today, if they are to remain aware of the children world, have numerous cable channels, tons of magazines, and of course the Internet. All are swollen with opportunities aimed at the 8-to-18-year-old demographic. It gives kids today terrific power. They have the retail industry wrapped around their little finger, and the media furiously develops product that shows children in control of their, if not the, world. In their world, the 2009 kids find it popular to say to anyone outside that world, that is, anyone over 30, “Don’t speak unless you’re spoken to.”
I have heard chatter coming from that world lately. At the college where I teach journalism and media studies, female students began to adopt anti-intellectualism as a tool of popularity. Apparently they would expend quite a bit of energy at their desks, affecting and maintaining an air of indifference. One student told me that when she raises a hand to contribute to the class discussion, the girls behind her roll their eyes at each other and say, “There she goes again.”
Then in the San Diego media, a story developed about a high school girl posing for artsy photos in a student-produced “literary” magazine. The girl was also a professional (though very much still at the portfolio-building stage) model. The story developed when her parents, who knew about her professional activities, became angry when the “lit mag” was published without their knowledge. Apparently the girl never told them about the project.
Shortly after that, being 16 years old and pregnant landed a teen idol named Jamie Lynn Spears (she is Britney's sister) on the cover of OK! Magazine. And that story inspired a teen-world reaction story on the front page of The New York Times. Talk about a fame party!
But that's another story. The story here is about three recent examples of activity in the parallel-universe youth world that give us fogies useful, if occasionally terrifying, information about that world. It is possible that kids in their youth world believe in their power, and that their power is greater than ours. They no longer are obligated to check with us, or to participate with us, and don’t expect us, or want us, to speak unless we are spoken to. More often these days, I get that feeling when I am speaking to them from the front of my classroom. Maybe educators should put the entire curriculum on YouTube and just go home.
September 28, 2009
September 27, 2009
graynation: being white in the 1950s
I was saying a couple of Sundays ago that remembering the 1950s didn't make me feel particularly old, but remembering the 1940s sure did. I think that must be because the 1950s have a similarity to the world I live in now, whereas the '40s were truly the ancient times.
The '50s were the years when the world started to change from old – pre- 1950 – to new. In fact, the 1950s were tumultuous with change. The media and consumer driven world of the early 21st century can trace its roots directly to events of the 1950s. It's strange. To people with only a general attentiveness to history, the 1950s have receded into memory as a quiet time, a period of Eisenhower-era tranquility. The tumultuous 1960s by contrast certainly did what they could to enhance that memory. But the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author David Halberstam saw so much happening in the 1950s that he wrote a complete book, titled, simply, “The ‘50s.”
Cars, television, radio, music, suburbs, shopping centers, clothes, advertising, everything was changing. It is true that at the time, in Abilene, Texas, much of that change occurred with the force of a pebble dropping unheard into a distant pond, such as the unanimous Supreme Court decision of May 17, 1954, that ended the “separate but equal” doctrine of educational facilities for whites and blacks. That ripple would not reach Abilene for another decade.
Which means that I, essentially, grew up in an exclusively white community. Of all the strange things about life on that planet, I believe that, today, for me, remains the strangest. In Abilene, Texas, in the 1950s, there were separate facilities, wherever they were required, for the black population. Water fountains, restrooms, waiting areas, a part of town, all identified by the same label: “Colored.” Downtown stores, restaurants and movie theaters were closed to blacks, to whom the Abilene media commonly referred as “Negroes.” If it were socially necessary, newspapers of that time would airbrush photos to remove black people from the image before publishing it in the paper.
The education codes, unlike the social (written and unwritten) codes, didn’t say anything about any of the other races: Hispanic, Asian, Indian. Not many of them did, but any of those could attend white high schools and play white high school football. There were black Abilene teenagers in those days who were very good football players, like Robert Kelley and Louis Kelley, who played for the Woodson Rams, the Colored high school down in Colored Town on the east side below the railroad tracks. Woodson and black high schools in the other cities played in their own league. The Rams, whose colors were green and white, did play some of their games at the white stadium, Fair Park Stadium, but that was as close as the Kelleys or any of those high school kids could come to wondering what it would be like to go to Abilene High School, be an Abilene Eagle. White kids liked to go to the Woodson games because it was good football and Woodson High had a small but joyous band.
Those games were the only social contact I ever had with black kids. Then, in 1961, I was graduated from Abilene High and in the fall began my freshman year at Stanford University. Total culture shock. The biggest shaping event of my life. In 1969, after school and three years in the Army, I came back to Abilene and got a job at The Abilene Reporter-News, covering high school sports. Something had happened while I was gone. Desegregation reached Abilene. On the teams were kids like Kelvin Ceasar, at Cooper High, and Don Brown at AHS. Today, in Abilene, it's like segregation never happened. But one thought stays with me, as I sit here in my skin, in this place on the planet that I have arrived this morning in my 66th year. To change all that, to change my life completely, you would only have to change one thing about me. Make my skin black.
The '50s were the years when the world started to change from old – pre- 1950 – to new. In fact, the 1950s were tumultuous with change. The media and consumer driven world of the early 21st century can trace its roots directly to events of the 1950s. It's strange. To people with only a general attentiveness to history, the 1950s have receded into memory as a quiet time, a period of Eisenhower-era tranquility. The tumultuous 1960s by contrast certainly did what they could to enhance that memory. But the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author David Halberstam saw so much happening in the 1950s that he wrote a complete book, titled, simply, “The ‘50s.”
Cars, television, radio, music, suburbs, shopping centers, clothes, advertising, everything was changing. It is true that at the time, in Abilene, Texas, much of that change occurred with the force of a pebble dropping unheard into a distant pond, such as the unanimous Supreme Court decision of May 17, 1954, that ended the “separate but equal” doctrine of educational facilities for whites and blacks. That ripple would not reach Abilene for another decade.
Which means that I, essentially, grew up in an exclusively white community. Of all the strange things about life on that planet, I believe that, today, for me, remains the strangest. In Abilene, Texas, in the 1950s, there were separate facilities, wherever they were required, for the black population. Water fountains, restrooms, waiting areas, a part of town, all identified by the same label: “Colored.” Downtown stores, restaurants and movie theaters were closed to blacks, to whom the Abilene media commonly referred as “Negroes.” If it were socially necessary, newspapers of that time would airbrush photos to remove black people from the image before publishing it in the paper.
The education codes, unlike the social (written and unwritten) codes, didn’t say anything about any of the other races: Hispanic, Asian, Indian. Not many of them did, but any of those could attend white high schools and play white high school football. There were black Abilene teenagers in those days who were very good football players, like Robert Kelley and Louis Kelley, who played for the Woodson Rams, the Colored high school down in Colored Town on the east side below the railroad tracks. Woodson and black high schools in the other cities played in their own league. The Rams, whose colors were green and white, did play some of their games at the white stadium, Fair Park Stadium, but that was as close as the Kelleys or any of those high school kids could come to wondering what it would be like to go to Abilene High School, be an Abilene Eagle. White kids liked to go to the Woodson games because it was good football and Woodson High had a small but joyous band.
Those games were the only social contact I ever had with black kids. Then, in 1961, I was graduated from Abilene High and in the fall began my freshman year at Stanford University. Total culture shock. The biggest shaping event of my life. In 1969, after school and three years in the Army, I came back to Abilene and got a job at The Abilene Reporter-News, covering high school sports. Something had happened while I was gone. Desegregation reached Abilene. On the teams were kids like Kelvin Ceasar, at Cooper High, and Don Brown at AHS. Today, in Abilene, it's like segregation never happened. But one thought stays with me, as I sit here in my skin, in this place on the planet that I have arrived this morning in my 66th year. To change all that, to change my life completely, you would only have to change one thing about me. Make my skin black.
September 25, 2009
Archives: Johnny Gerhart
April, 2006: Johnny Gerhart’s name came up again this week, in an incidental way. Oran Logan, a ninth-grade classmate of John’s at South Junior High School (Abilene, Texas, 1957-58) came into possession of scrapbook material that Oran’s mother had kept all these years. Among these was a page from the school newspaper, the “Coyote Howl” (coyote pronounced “ky-yoat,” in the West Texan dialect).
The page announced the results of student polling for ninth-grade class favorites. There were Friendliest Girl and Boy, Beautiful Girl, Handsome Boy, Most Talented Girl and Boy, Best All-Around Girl and Boy, Girl and Boy Most Likely to Succeed, Most Athletic Girl and Boy.
This page was circulated among an email classmates list. It was fun seeing again who won, and wry comments were passed around (“Bob Cluck was runner-up Handsome Boy?”).
Most of the comments, though, were about Johnny Gerhart, who was selected Boy Most Likely to Succeed.
It shows the power of even the unsophisticated to detect greatness. Not a single one of us in the hallways of South Junior in 1957-58 would have seen Gerhart coming down the hall and thought: “Harvard grad, double degree in English and French history and literature; at Harvard, he wrote for the Crimson (school newspaper); took a year off in 1963 to teach high school in Tanzania; a Masters and a Ph.D. in Public Affairs from Princeton; international educator and philanthropist; from 1969-98, a Ford Foundation representative all over Africa; president of The American University in Cairo, 1998-2002; named by Princeton’s graduate faculties as one of their 100 most notable alumni of the 20th century.”
Nope, we just saw Johnny, coming down the hall, on the short side, plaid shirt, Levi’s rolled up two laps, grinning and waving hello (I’ll bet he won Friendliest, too, but they couldn’t give two awards), just one of us. But we knew something. We looked at Johnny Gerhart and voted him Boy Most Likely to Succeed, hands down. How did we know he would be South’s most notable 1958 alumnus of the 20th century, 43 years before the Princeton vote?
That’s what the talk was about this week. It felt so good to us to find his name there. Johnny Gerhart died of cancer in July, 2003. We had hardly seen him in all those decades; he left Abilene, went to private school in Austin, then to Harvard and off on his international path of brilliance. But we didn’t forget him. We were among the first to see, somehow, the unforgettability that stayed with him wherever he went, among whomever he walked, from unschooled ninth graders to foreign kings. We felt included in a natural community with John at its center, the creator of the community, which is how, after his death, he was remembered by so many.
The eulogies and remembrances and stories were collected and now are maintained at the Website of “Alliance” magazine, “the leading magazine on philanthropy and social investment across the world." The first three tributes are from the president, the first lady, and the prime minister of Egypt. The rest, “Messages from friends and colleagues,” from all over the globe, scrolling down and down, are more informal and informative, filling in many blanks that our South Junior instincts knew were there.
Not a one of the 40 messages is from one of John’s South Junior classmates, a gap which I undertake to correct. Much of the affection is nothing new. “Always when we met again it was as if we were resuming a conversation that we had left off in mid-sentence.” Yep. That’s the way Johnny put us all first. “I have been lucky to know all kinds of wonderful, smart and original people,” says another. “But John was one of the very, very, very special ones.” No lie, as we used to say at South.
But he was also a collector of African art, and an expert bird watcher. I never knew that. He was also an expert storyteller, and I don’t remember that, but it makes sense. Many of his friends remembered John’s father, the Rev. Willis P. Gerhart, as anyone does in 1957-58 Abilene who met John’s father. There was no mistaking Rev. Gerhart’s intellect, or vivre, or fondness for good stories, or willingness to tell them. Being his son made Johnny mysterious. So austere a robed presence, commanding a towering white Episcopal church on South Sixth. Directly across from the church was a neighborhood grocery store, with wood floors and screen doors, owned by Eddie Baldwin’s father. Eddie was named “Friendliest Boy” in our poll. And just around the corner from these two lived Pam Oswalt, who was just gorgeous but, darn it, went to Lincoln Junior. That block on South Sixth must have been the closest thing to a vortex that Abilene had.
Now there are a couple of things about Johnny that the other messengers may not know. Wherever in the world he was, or whomever he was with, if Johnny saw a coyote, and called it a ky-yoat, he was only being true to his roots. Once a South Junior Ky-yoat, always a South Junior Ky-yoat. Secondly, a Ford Foundation colleague wrote about John and women: “His reputation for hiring smart, dynamic women was known throughout the Ford Foundation.”
When you went to junior high with Gena Jay (“Friendliest Girl”), Pat Wright (“Best All-Around Girl”), Crystal Ragsdale (“Most Beautiful Girl”) and Nancy Shoemaker (“Girl Most Likely to Succeed”) AND lived across the street from Pam Oswalt, you couldn’t help but take that appreciation forward. We haven’t forgotten Johnny Gerhart. And Johnny didn’t forget us.
The page announced the results of student polling for ninth-grade class favorites. There were Friendliest Girl and Boy, Beautiful Girl, Handsome Boy, Most Talented Girl and Boy, Best All-Around Girl and Boy, Girl and Boy Most Likely to Succeed, Most Athletic Girl and Boy.
This page was circulated among an email classmates list. It was fun seeing again who won, and wry comments were passed around (“Bob Cluck was runner-up Handsome Boy?”).
Most of the comments, though, were about Johnny Gerhart, who was selected Boy Most Likely to Succeed.
It shows the power of even the unsophisticated to detect greatness. Not a single one of us in the hallways of South Junior in 1957-58 would have seen Gerhart coming down the hall and thought: “Harvard grad, double degree in English and French history and literature; at Harvard, he wrote for the Crimson (school newspaper); took a year off in 1963 to teach high school in Tanzania; a Masters and a Ph.D. in Public Affairs from Princeton; international educator and philanthropist; from 1969-98, a Ford Foundation representative all over Africa; president of The American University in Cairo, 1998-2002; named by Princeton’s graduate faculties as one of their 100 most notable alumni of the 20th century.”
Nope, we just saw Johnny, coming down the hall, on the short side, plaid shirt, Levi’s rolled up two laps, grinning and waving hello (I’ll bet he won Friendliest, too, but they couldn’t give two awards), just one of us. But we knew something. We looked at Johnny Gerhart and voted him Boy Most Likely to Succeed, hands down. How did we know he would be South’s most notable 1958 alumnus of the 20th century, 43 years before the Princeton vote?
That’s what the talk was about this week. It felt so good to us to find his name there. Johnny Gerhart died of cancer in July, 2003. We had hardly seen him in all those decades; he left Abilene, went to private school in Austin, then to Harvard and off on his international path of brilliance. But we didn’t forget him. We were among the first to see, somehow, the unforgettability that stayed with him wherever he went, among whomever he walked, from unschooled ninth graders to foreign kings. We felt included in a natural community with John at its center, the creator of the community, which is how, after his death, he was remembered by so many.
The eulogies and remembrances and stories were collected and now are maintained at the Website of “Alliance” magazine, “the leading magazine on philanthropy and social investment across the world." The first three tributes are from the president, the first lady, and the prime minister of Egypt. The rest, “Messages from friends and colleagues,” from all over the globe, scrolling down and down, are more informal and informative, filling in many blanks that our South Junior instincts knew were there.
Not a one of the 40 messages is from one of John’s South Junior classmates, a gap which I undertake to correct. Much of the affection is nothing new. “Always when we met again it was as if we were resuming a conversation that we had left off in mid-sentence.” Yep. That’s the way Johnny put us all first. “I have been lucky to know all kinds of wonderful, smart and original people,” says another. “But John was one of the very, very, very special ones.” No lie, as we used to say at South.
But he was also a collector of African art, and an expert bird watcher. I never knew that. He was also an expert storyteller, and I don’t remember that, but it makes sense. Many of his friends remembered John’s father, the Rev. Willis P. Gerhart, as anyone does in 1957-58 Abilene who met John’s father. There was no mistaking Rev. Gerhart’s intellect, or vivre, or fondness for good stories, or willingness to tell them. Being his son made Johnny mysterious. So austere a robed presence, commanding a towering white Episcopal church on South Sixth. Directly across from the church was a neighborhood grocery store, with wood floors and screen doors, owned by Eddie Baldwin’s father. Eddie was named “Friendliest Boy” in our poll. And just around the corner from these two lived Pam Oswalt, who was just gorgeous but, darn it, went to Lincoln Junior. That block on South Sixth must have been the closest thing to a vortex that Abilene had.
Now there are a couple of things about Johnny that the other messengers may not know. Wherever in the world he was, or whomever he was with, if Johnny saw a coyote, and called it a ky-yoat, he was only being true to his roots. Once a South Junior Ky-yoat, always a South Junior Ky-yoat. Secondly, a Ford Foundation colleague wrote about John and women: “His reputation for hiring smart, dynamic women was known throughout the Ford Foundation.”
When you went to junior high with Gena Jay (“Friendliest Girl”), Pat Wright (“Best All-Around Girl”), Crystal Ragsdale (“Most Beautiful Girl”) and Nancy Shoemaker (“Girl Most Likely to Succeed”) AND lived across the street from Pam Oswalt, you couldn’t help but take that appreciation forward. We haven’t forgotten Johnny Gerhart. And Johnny didn’t forget us.
September 24, 2009
Stretch Cooking: Some late, lamented freezer space
For several years, we have had two refrigerators in the house, one in the kitchen and one on the back porch, which is enclosed but not air conditioned. The BPIB (back porch icebox) was an older model, with exposed coils. When we looked for ways to cut our electric bill, our eyes fell almost automatically, and sorrowfully, on the BPIB. Last week, the men came to take it away.
It puts a dent in stretch cooking strategies. I have lost half my freezer space. The back freezer is where I held the meats I bought at CostCo, sliced into cooking sizes, and wrapped for freezing. In there, for example, were 17 wrapped packages each containing two half-inch slices of pork loin from a whole loin I bought for $17.65, a dozen half-pound packages of hamburger, and some sirloin steaks. Not to mention a six-dozen package of Porkyland’s tortillas, which freeze beautifully.
How Karen got all that stuff into the kitchen freezer, I do not know. But it was FULL. Excavation is now required to find everyday meal items like frozen slices of Trader Joe’s sourdough. But we will adjust. Freezer items we tend to use every day – bread, fruit, black-eyes, green beans, etc. – will gravitate toward the front.
The vegetables are already cooked and frozen in plastic containers. They get eaten before freezer burn can start. I hate those containers, by the way. I hate washing them, they are hard to store, and they have a built-in bounce that drives me nuts. I tolerate them, though, because of the facility with which they keep black-eyes and other stretch goodies in the freezer until you’re ready to eat them.
Many people cook everything first, then freeze it. Many people belong to that part of the stretch culture that does once-a-month cooking. I am not among those. I do quite a bit of once-a-week cooking, and freeze half of it, if it is what I call freezable. You can freeze chili, for example, but not barbecue, either beef or pork. I would no more put barbecued pork shoulder in the freezer than I would throw it in the dirt outside.
So I freeze a goodly amount of fresh meat. I avoid freezer burn by wrapping the meat tightly in foil and placing the packages in gallon-sized Ziploc freezer bags. It is air, of course, that causes freezer burn. If you have any question at all about freezer burn, by the way, go here. Or to any other of the 370,000 results that Google shows for “freezer burn.” I tell you, there’s not an adjective astonishing enough to describe the Internet as a repository of information.
It puts a dent in stretch cooking strategies. I have lost half my freezer space. The back freezer is where I held the meats I bought at CostCo, sliced into cooking sizes, and wrapped for freezing. In there, for example, were 17 wrapped packages each containing two half-inch slices of pork loin from a whole loin I bought for $17.65, a dozen half-pound packages of hamburger, and some sirloin steaks. Not to mention a six-dozen package of Porkyland’s tortillas, which freeze beautifully.
How Karen got all that stuff into the kitchen freezer, I do not know. But it was FULL. Excavation is now required to find everyday meal items like frozen slices of Trader Joe’s sourdough. But we will adjust. Freezer items we tend to use every day – bread, fruit, black-eyes, green beans, etc. – will gravitate toward the front.
The vegetables are already cooked and frozen in plastic containers. They get eaten before freezer burn can start. I hate those containers, by the way. I hate washing them, they are hard to store, and they have a built-in bounce that drives me nuts. I tolerate them, though, because of the facility with which they keep black-eyes and other stretch goodies in the freezer until you’re ready to eat them.
Many people cook everything first, then freeze it. Many people belong to that part of the stretch culture that does once-a-month cooking. I am not among those. I do quite a bit of once-a-week cooking, and freeze half of it, if it is what I call freezable. You can freeze chili, for example, but not barbecue, either beef or pork. I would no more put barbecued pork shoulder in the freezer than I would throw it in the dirt outside.
So I freeze a goodly amount of fresh meat. I avoid freezer burn by wrapping the meat tightly in foil and placing the packages in gallon-sized Ziploc freezer bags. It is air, of course, that causes freezer burn. If you have any question at all about freezer burn, by the way, go here. Or to any other of the 370,000 results that Google shows for “freezer burn.” I tell you, there’s not an adjective astonishing enough to describe the Internet as a repository of information.
September 21, 2009
Media Literacy: Newspapers' online salvation: subscribers and multipliers
I hope Nicholas Negroponte doesn't get mad if I quote two full paragraphs from his 1995 book, "Being Digital." I only do it because 1) I desperately want newspapers to survive their transition from newsprint to digital, and 2) I desperately want other Internet content to survive. It is history's greatest library, and it can only survive if the paragraphs that follow become reality. Here are Negroponte's words from 1995:
"It was through The New York Times that I came to know and enjoy the writing of the computer and communications business reporter, John Markoff. Without The New York Times, I would never have known of his work. However, now that I do, it would be far easier for me to have an automatic method to collect any new story Markoff writes and drop it into my personalized newspaper or suggested-reading list. I would probably be willing to pay Markoff the proverbial 'two cents' for each of his stories.
"If one two-hundredth of the 1995 Internet population were to subscribe to this idea and John were to write a hundred stories a year (he actually writes between one-hundred-twenty and one-hundred-forty), he would earn $1,000,000 per year, which I am prepared to guess is more than The New York Times pays him. If you think one two-hundredth is too big a proportion, then wait a short while. The numbers really do work."
Now that it is 2009, Negroponte's figures will need updating. The target percentage of the 2009 Internet population, to make the system work, may by now be one two-thousandth. It would be easy enough to do the math. But the key words in the two paragraphs are "two cents" and "subscribe."
In the old, traditional days of newspapering, subscribers didn't make the publishers rich. Advertising did. But the Internet is truly revolutionary because 1) between the media and the public, the Internet turns the direction of information around 180 degrees, and 2) it eliminates the old, traditional distribution costs, which was – still is – cruelly expensive. That's why advertisers have fled traditional newspapers. The cost for companies to do their own online advertising is a tiny, tiny percentage of the traditional distribution arrangement.
A third revolutionary effect, which Negroponte realized 15 years ago, is the multiplier effect. Since the Internet is global, immediate, and available for pennies to the masses, Internet businesses can attract millions or billions of visitors, and make billions or trillions by charging each visitor two cents each per visit. I realized this myself, in the 1990s, when one day I was trying to tie my necktie. For decades, I wished I could tie a Windsor knot. By then, I was familiar enough with the Internet to understand its reach, and the ease of that reach. So I decided to search.
My search engine at the time was Alta Vista. I searched "Windsor knot" and was presented with 37 returns for sites about Windsor knots. At that instant, I knew that the Internet was something of great power. Just now, Googling "Windsor knot," I am presented with 105,000 returns. This volume is possible because the information is only files in a computer, waiting to be accessed by a global audience whose only expense is access to the Internet.
Why should Windsor knot merchants spend a penny on advertising? So newspapers, and other traditional distributors of advertising, are left high and dry. If the advertising money tree has dried up, where can newspapers turn? Subscribers. It is truly revolutionary. Reading his book, I believe Negroponte thought it would happen naturally. But it hasn't. On the Internet, businesses give away information for free. This can't go on. On the Internet, the only businesses that advertisers will support is themselves.
What should transpire? A subscriber system. Every time an Internet user clicks into a Website, that site should receive two cents from the visitor. Every Internet user will open a subscription account of $30 a month (1,500 site visits) through a central payment system. The account will be debited two cents for each site visited. If the site is The New York Times, the fee will be charged to each story visited. The Times and the reporter will negotiate an agreement in which the reporter gets a cut of the two cents – let's say it is 50-50 – which means, in Negroponte's aging Markoff example, both the reporter and the newspaper will earn $500,000 a year from the reporter's stories. I am prepared to guess the arrangement would be acceptable to both parties.
Every content provider – this blog, for example – will receive two cents per visit. Popular blogs will realize considerable revenue, which is appropriate, and schlock blogs will wither, which seems equally appropriate. Internet surfers, when they are required to pay for it, will think twice about where they deposit their two cents, always wanting their two cents' worth. The result will be better Internet content quality. That will be a nice bonus. My only concern in writing this today, though, is the quality of the free, aggressive, well-staffed, well-edited press. Without that, this country is in danger of collapsing.
"It was through The New York Times that I came to know and enjoy the writing of the computer and communications business reporter, John Markoff. Without The New York Times, I would never have known of his work. However, now that I do, it would be far easier for me to have an automatic method to collect any new story Markoff writes and drop it into my personalized newspaper or suggested-reading list. I would probably be willing to pay Markoff the proverbial 'two cents' for each of his stories.
"If one two-hundredth of the 1995 Internet population were to subscribe to this idea and John were to write a hundred stories a year (he actually writes between one-hundred-twenty and one-hundred-forty), he would earn $1,000,000 per year, which I am prepared to guess is more than The New York Times pays him. If you think one two-hundredth is too big a proportion, then wait a short while. The numbers really do work."
Now that it is 2009, Negroponte's figures will need updating. The target percentage of the 2009 Internet population, to make the system work, may by now be one two-thousandth. It would be easy enough to do the math. But the key words in the two paragraphs are "two cents" and "subscribe."
In the old, traditional days of newspapering, subscribers didn't make the publishers rich. Advertising did. But the Internet is truly revolutionary because 1) between the media and the public, the Internet turns the direction of information around 180 degrees, and 2) it eliminates the old, traditional distribution costs, which was – still is – cruelly expensive. That's why advertisers have fled traditional newspapers. The cost for companies to do their own online advertising is a tiny, tiny percentage of the traditional distribution arrangement.
A third revolutionary effect, which Negroponte realized 15 years ago, is the multiplier effect. Since the Internet is global, immediate, and available for pennies to the masses, Internet businesses can attract millions or billions of visitors, and make billions or trillions by charging each visitor two cents each per visit. I realized this myself, in the 1990s, when one day I was trying to tie my necktie. For decades, I wished I could tie a Windsor knot. By then, I was familiar enough with the Internet to understand its reach, and the ease of that reach. So I decided to search.
My search engine at the time was Alta Vista. I searched "Windsor knot" and was presented with 37 returns for sites about Windsor knots. At that instant, I knew that the Internet was something of great power. Just now, Googling "Windsor knot," I am presented with 105,000 returns. This volume is possible because the information is only files in a computer, waiting to be accessed by a global audience whose only expense is access to the Internet.
Why should Windsor knot merchants spend a penny on advertising? So newspapers, and other traditional distributors of advertising, are left high and dry. If the advertising money tree has dried up, where can newspapers turn? Subscribers. It is truly revolutionary. Reading his book, I believe Negroponte thought it would happen naturally. But it hasn't. On the Internet, businesses give away information for free. This can't go on. On the Internet, the only businesses that advertisers will support is themselves.
What should transpire? A subscriber system. Every time an Internet user clicks into a Website, that site should receive two cents from the visitor. Every Internet user will open a subscription account of $30 a month (1,500 site visits) through a central payment system. The account will be debited two cents for each site visited. If the site is The New York Times, the fee will be charged to each story visited. The Times and the reporter will negotiate an agreement in which the reporter gets a cut of the two cents – let's say it is 50-50 – which means, in Negroponte's aging Markoff example, both the reporter and the newspaper will earn $500,000 a year from the reporter's stories. I am prepared to guess the arrangement would be acceptable to both parties.
Every content provider – this blog, for example – will receive two cents per visit. Popular blogs will realize considerable revenue, which is appropriate, and schlock blogs will wither, which seems equally appropriate. Internet surfers, when they are required to pay for it, will think twice about where they deposit their two cents, always wanting their two cents' worth. The result will be better Internet content quality. That will be a nice bonus. My only concern in writing this today, though, is the quality of the free, aggressive, well-staffed, well-edited press. Without that, this country is in danger of collapsing.
September 20, 2009
graynation: YouTube's window to the birth of rock
I am starting to let YouTube consume far too much of my time, but I can't stop my brain from popping up with thoughts like, "I bet I can find 'Party Doll' on YouTube."
After that, what can a man do, but find out? And, of course, there it is. Then there's that menu of associated clips, and it includes "Searchin'," "Whispering Bells," and "Poor Little Fool." And "Click Clack!" I bet I haven't thought about "Click Clack" since the 20th century ended. But there they were, Dicky Doo and the Don'ts, and the acclaimed chorus: "And the wheels go oom-ba-la-la-la click clack, oom-ba-la-la-la shoo! Oom-ba-la-la-la every click clack brings me closer to you!"
And there goes an hour I could have been working on peace in our time.
I am going to blame my parents. They contrived to bring me into the world just at the right time to make me 12 years old when rock and roll came in and blew away the Perry Como Era. One spring night in 1955, a couple hundred junior high and high school kids sauntered into the Paramount Theater (tickets were 25 cents), as we always did on Friday nights, and we took our seats in our usual sections, our Paramount "turf."
The movie this Friday night was “Blackboard Jungle,” starring Glenn Ford and Anne Francis. Also in the cast were two young actors, Vic Morrow and Sidney Poitier. None of the kids in the theater knew anything about the movie; we were there because it was Friday night. First there was the black-and-white newsreel, then the cartoon, then the curtain fell in preamble to the feature. The effect was to set up anticipation, and in fact the crowd became quiet. There were two or three moments of relative calm. Then:
“One two three o’clock four o’clock ROCK!
“Five six seven o’clock eight o’clock ROCK!
“Nine ten eleven o’clock twelve o’clock ROCK!
“We’re gonna ROCK around the CLOCK tonight!”
It was music, very loud and urgent, and it thundered on into its first verse – “When the clock strikes one, join me hon” – but the kids in the Paramount Theater sat rock-still, stunned, staring at the rising curtain, transfixed by the energy blasting at them from Bill Haley and the Comets.
We knew there was something happening to music out there somewhere. We could catch snatches of it on local stations KRBC and KWKC, but we had better luck if we searched for stations in New Orleans, Oklahoma City and Nashville, that came in sometimes with remarkable clarity through a still-uncluttered sky. This was high-energy music that came from people with exotic names like Fats Domino, Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley, and it didn’t sound at all like what we were accustomed to hearing from Gisele MacKenzie, Mitch Miller, Les Baxter, Perry Como, Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney.
We were intrigued by the new music, but it had come from somewhere else far away across the sky. Now we sat in our very own Paramount, with its big speakers and this high-speed music rocketing at us, and for several seconds we were frozen by it. Then we reacted. We jumped up and yelled and the cooler ones got into the aisles and danced in frenzy. It was a before-and-after moment that no one there would ever forget.
The title of the song was “Rock Around the Clock,” and it came to Abilene and all the other cities as a nice example of cross-media marketing. In the 1950s, the recording industry’s principal marketing outlet was radio. Listeners who heard a song on the radio might then go buy it at a record store.
But there were only 24 hours available in a day, and not many radio stations. In 1955, Abilene had only two, meaning there were only 48 music marketing hours available in any given day. Worse, the stations used much of their time to broadcast soap operas, news, and shows like “Farm Roundup,” “Mixing Bowl,” and “Arthur Godfrey.” Their music playlists leaned to proven artists and songs like “Hard to Get,” “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” and “Love is a Many Splendored Thing.” It would be years before enough radio stations existed to develop what came to be called “narrowcasting.” In 1955, on KRBC and KWKC, you took what you got, in a very mixed bag.
So “Rock Around the Clock” rode a movie into town, and the results were instructive to future students of cross-media marketing. “Rock Around the Clock” became the first example of this new music to reach No. 1 on the Billboard Magazine rating charts, and it did so very quickly, reaching No. 1 in June.
The movie was electrifying, too, about gangs in schools not only challenging, but intimidating and literally attacking authority. The teacher, Richard Dadier, played by Glenn Ford, wins in the end, the punk Vic Morrow is hauled away, and Sidney Poitier (a black kid!) leaves the bad guys and becomes a good one. The movie was so controversial that many communities would not allow it to be shown, including, of all places, Memphis, Tennessee.
But Abilene did, and kids who came out of the Paramount that night weren’t the same kids who went in. They came out in possession of a new kind of music, and they knew a new word: “daddio.” It was the first night in Abilene of a new extension of culture that would become a culture unto itself. It tickles me, talking to my kids and grandkids, and all my students, who now think of this culture as their own, to tell them I was there the night it was born. My God, I sound like one of the Three Wise Men.
After that, what can a man do, but find out? And, of course, there it is. Then there's that menu of associated clips, and it includes "Searchin'," "Whispering Bells," and "Poor Little Fool." And "Click Clack!" I bet I haven't thought about "Click Clack" since the 20th century ended. But there they were, Dicky Doo and the Don'ts, and the acclaimed chorus: "And the wheels go oom-ba-la-la-la click clack, oom-ba-la-la-la shoo! Oom-ba-la-la-la every click clack brings me closer to you!"
And there goes an hour I could have been working on peace in our time.
I am going to blame my parents. They contrived to bring me into the world just at the right time to make me 12 years old when rock and roll came in and blew away the Perry Como Era. One spring night in 1955, a couple hundred junior high and high school kids sauntered into the Paramount Theater (tickets were 25 cents), as we always did on Friday nights, and we took our seats in our usual sections, our Paramount "turf."
The movie this Friday night was “Blackboard Jungle,” starring Glenn Ford and Anne Francis. Also in the cast were two young actors, Vic Morrow and Sidney Poitier. None of the kids in the theater knew anything about the movie; we were there because it was Friday night. First there was the black-and-white newsreel, then the cartoon, then the curtain fell in preamble to the feature. The effect was to set up anticipation, and in fact the crowd became quiet. There were two or three moments of relative calm. Then:
“One two three o’clock four o’clock ROCK!
“Five six seven o’clock eight o’clock ROCK!
“Nine ten eleven o’clock twelve o’clock ROCK!
“We’re gonna ROCK around the CLOCK tonight!”
It was music, very loud and urgent, and it thundered on into its first verse – “When the clock strikes one, join me hon” – but the kids in the Paramount Theater sat rock-still, stunned, staring at the rising curtain, transfixed by the energy blasting at them from Bill Haley and the Comets.
We knew there was something happening to music out there somewhere. We could catch snatches of it on local stations KRBC and KWKC, but we had better luck if we searched for stations in New Orleans, Oklahoma City and Nashville, that came in sometimes with remarkable clarity through a still-uncluttered sky. This was high-energy music that came from people with exotic names like Fats Domino, Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley, and it didn’t sound at all like what we were accustomed to hearing from Gisele MacKenzie, Mitch Miller, Les Baxter, Perry Como, Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney.
We were intrigued by the new music, but it had come from somewhere else far away across the sky. Now we sat in our very own Paramount, with its big speakers and this high-speed music rocketing at us, and for several seconds we were frozen by it. Then we reacted. We jumped up and yelled and the cooler ones got into the aisles and danced in frenzy. It was a before-and-after moment that no one there would ever forget.
The title of the song was “Rock Around the Clock,” and it came to Abilene and all the other cities as a nice example of cross-media marketing. In the 1950s, the recording industry’s principal marketing outlet was radio. Listeners who heard a song on the radio might then go buy it at a record store.
But there were only 24 hours available in a day, and not many radio stations. In 1955, Abilene had only two, meaning there were only 48 music marketing hours available in any given day. Worse, the stations used much of their time to broadcast soap operas, news, and shows like “Farm Roundup,” “Mixing Bowl,” and “Arthur Godfrey.” Their music playlists leaned to proven artists and songs like “Hard to Get,” “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” and “Love is a Many Splendored Thing.” It would be years before enough radio stations existed to develop what came to be called “narrowcasting.” In 1955, on KRBC and KWKC, you took what you got, in a very mixed bag.
So “Rock Around the Clock” rode a movie into town, and the results were instructive to future students of cross-media marketing. “Rock Around the Clock” became the first example of this new music to reach No. 1 on the Billboard Magazine rating charts, and it did so very quickly, reaching No. 1 in June.
The movie was electrifying, too, about gangs in schools not only challenging, but intimidating and literally attacking authority. The teacher, Richard Dadier, played by Glenn Ford, wins in the end, the punk Vic Morrow is hauled away, and Sidney Poitier (a black kid!) leaves the bad guys and becomes a good one. The movie was so controversial that many communities would not allow it to be shown, including, of all places, Memphis, Tennessee.
But Abilene did, and kids who came out of the Paramount that night weren’t the same kids who went in. They came out in possession of a new kind of music, and they knew a new word: “daddio.” It was the first night in Abilene of a new extension of culture that would become a culture unto itself. It tickles me, talking to my kids and grandkids, and all my students, who now think of this culture as their own, to tell them I was there the night it was born. My God, I sound like one of the Three Wise Men.
September 18, 2009
Archives: People are reactionary - September, 2005
September, 2005: Karen, my bride to be, has 25 years experience in organizational systems analysis. I am in media. We sit side-by-side these days and have interesting conversations.
She talks about what happens in organizations that need to change, and know it, but resist. It drove her crazy to be assigned a systems analysis within an organization or institution, discover the problem and report it, then watch while nothing happened.
"People and organizations really need to be afraid, or in pain, before change can occur," she said. It makes no difference, she says, how vitally the change is needed, to avoid institutional ruin, or disasters like Sept. 11, Iraq, New Orleans and pension funds. Not until after the fact will the people in charge go back to the pre-disaster analysis, recognize the truth in it, and then do something about it.
I tell Karen how people in my business, the media, constantly call for change in our newspaper and magazine pages. Long reports have been published in the last five years about what a major hurricane would do to New Orleans, with scenarios almost identical to what actually happened with Katrina.
"You know," I said, "the media could have published an in-depth report on teenagers, culture, violence and guns, with a scenario of multiple deaths in an armed teenaged assault on a high school, and no one would have read it."
We looked at each other, realizing we were in the same business. It is our job to bring useful, even critical, projections to people who don't pay us the slightest bit of attention, until something actually happens.
Not one, but two long reports, first in Scientific American (2001), and National Geographic (last October!) described what would happen to New Orleans when the big hurricane hit. The Geographic story was almost word-for-word with the actual Katrina stories in the national media last week. The Times-Picayune in New Orleans has published countless stories about the danger of under-maintained levees and the difficulty of getting federal money to fix them.
The media could have published a story about how easily a major wildfire could get started in San Diego, and how planning, equipment and policies would be no match for it, and no one would have done anything about it until after the Cedar Fire.
That fire, in October 2003, burned 2,700 homes, killed 15 people and roared through more than 273,000 acres, from Julian down to Scripps Ranch, and since then, there have been plenty of changes in planning, equipment and policies.
Before 1978, the media could have published analyses of air traffic control patterns in the San Diego area, with no change occurring until after Sept. 25, 1978, when a mid-air collision over North Park killed 135 people on Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 182, two men in a Cessna, and seven people on the ground. Shortly after that, control patterns were changed that now send incoming airliners from the north all the way out to La Mesa before they turn around.
Presently there exists a scenario, developed and published by the state Office of Emergency Services in 1988, on the effect of a 6.3 earthquake in San Diego. I have written two stories about the scenario myself, one in this publication three months ago. So I ask readers: on what fault line is the scenario based? Where is the fault line located?
The disconnect is simple. The media sees stories in events that haven't happened yet. In the Toolbox, it’s called the Threat to the Status Quo. Readers and viewers don't see stories until they happen. Or, in Karen's case, they are scared to death. How do we change that? Somebody should write a story.
She talks about what happens in organizations that need to change, and know it, but resist. It drove her crazy to be assigned a systems analysis within an organization or institution, discover the problem and report it, then watch while nothing happened.
"People and organizations really need to be afraid, or in pain, before change can occur," she said. It makes no difference, she says, how vitally the change is needed, to avoid institutional ruin, or disasters like Sept. 11, Iraq, New Orleans and pension funds. Not until after the fact will the people in charge go back to the pre-disaster analysis, recognize the truth in it, and then do something about it.
I tell Karen how people in my business, the media, constantly call for change in our newspaper and magazine pages. Long reports have been published in the last five years about what a major hurricane would do to New Orleans, with scenarios almost identical to what actually happened with Katrina.
"You know," I said, "the media could have published an in-depth report on teenagers, culture, violence and guns, with a scenario of multiple deaths in an armed teenaged assault on a high school, and no one would have read it."
We looked at each other, realizing we were in the same business. It is our job to bring useful, even critical, projections to people who don't pay us the slightest bit of attention, until something actually happens.
Not one, but two long reports, first in Scientific American (2001), and National Geographic (last October!) described what would happen to New Orleans when the big hurricane hit. The Geographic story was almost word-for-word with the actual Katrina stories in the national media last week. The Times-Picayune in New Orleans has published countless stories about the danger of under-maintained levees and the difficulty of getting federal money to fix them.
The media could have published a story about how easily a major wildfire could get started in San Diego, and how planning, equipment and policies would be no match for it, and no one would have done anything about it until after the Cedar Fire.
That fire, in October 2003, burned 2,700 homes, killed 15 people and roared through more than 273,000 acres, from Julian down to Scripps Ranch, and since then, there have been plenty of changes in planning, equipment and policies.
Before 1978, the media could have published analyses of air traffic control patterns in the San Diego area, with no change occurring until after Sept. 25, 1978, when a mid-air collision over North Park killed 135 people on Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 182, two men in a Cessna, and seven people on the ground. Shortly after that, control patterns were changed that now send incoming airliners from the north all the way out to La Mesa before they turn around.
Presently there exists a scenario, developed and published by the state Office of Emergency Services in 1988, on the effect of a 6.3 earthquake in San Diego. I have written two stories about the scenario myself, one in this publication three months ago. So I ask readers: on what fault line is the scenario based? Where is the fault line located?
The disconnect is simple. The media sees stories in events that haven't happened yet. In the Toolbox, it’s called the Threat to the Status Quo. Readers and viewers don't see stories until they happen. Or, in Karen's case, they are scared to death. How do we change that? Somebody should write a story.
September 17, 2009
Stretch Cooking: nothing standard about Green Enchiladas
September is traditionally one of our hottest months in Southern California; in fact next week the weather bureau is looking for temperatures in the 90s or 100s in the inland valleys of San Diego, where we live.
That’s not to say it’s not the right time for Green Enchiladas. There is no unright time for Green Enchiladas, which is one of the most reliable comfort foods known to man. There are certain days, though, that issue a particular call for comfort food, and many of them are associated with cooler temperatures.
I am thinking specifically of the day that Daylight Savings Time ends. Spring forward, fall back. On Nov. 1, a Sunday, we will turn our clocks back one hour. On Monday night, we will suddenly be driving home from work in the dark. I hate that. And on Nov. 2, even in Southern California, it’s likely to be cool, maybe even rainy. Monday, Nov. 2, is the date I have circled for Green Enchiladas.
You want to make them on Sunday, then Monday night just pull them out and run them into a 350 oven for 30 or 40 minutes, until they’re steamy-hot all the way through.
The smallest batch you should make, even for two people – or even one person, for that matter, in which case you may REALLY need Green Enchiladas – is that which will fill a 9 by 13 Pyrex baking dish.
Brown a pound and a half of hamburger in a black skillet, seasoning to taste with salt, pepper, garlic powder, cumin and a scant teaspoon of Gebhardt’s Chile Powder. Put it aside to cool.
Make the sauce. In a large saucepan, melt two tablespoons of butter. Over medium-high heat, add three tablespoons of flour and stir with the butter to make a roux. Cook the roux just long enough to take off the raw flour taste. Add two cups of milk and stir constantly until the sauce thickens. Turn down the heat. Add two medium cans of diced green chiles and three-quarters of a pound of cubed Velveeta. Keep stirring until the Velveeta is melted and the sauce is smooth. Take the pan off the heat.
Have ready chopped onion and grated cheese. Prepare the tortillas. You need good corn tortillas. I recommend Porkyland’s, which you can mail-order, but if you have a good tortilleria near you, go for it. You will need 9 or 10. Paint both sides of the tortillas with oil. In a dry skillet, heat tortillas one by one and make a layer in the bottom of the baking dish. I like to cut one tortilla in half and snug the straight edges up to the ends of the pan. Make a layer of hamburger, chopped onion, and grated cheese. Be generous with the grated cheese. Repeat the tortilla layer, then repeat the hamburger etc. layer. Put on a top layer of tortillas. Then pour the chile-Velveeta sauce over all, getting it into all the seams and corners. Sprinkle the top with grated cheese.
Bake in a 350 oven for 40 minutes. Or cover with foil and refrigerate, as I am going to do on Nov. 1, in anticipation of Nov. 2. When it is ready, cut it into six sections with a spatula. Make a salad of shredded lettuce, chopped tomatoes, and good salsa, all mixed together, and serve on the plate with a section of Green Enchiladas. The only thing standard at your table on Nov. 2 will be the time.
That’s not to say it’s not the right time for Green Enchiladas. There is no unright time for Green Enchiladas, which is one of the most reliable comfort foods known to man. There are certain days, though, that issue a particular call for comfort food, and many of them are associated with cooler temperatures.
I am thinking specifically of the day that Daylight Savings Time ends. Spring forward, fall back. On Nov. 1, a Sunday, we will turn our clocks back one hour. On Monday night, we will suddenly be driving home from work in the dark. I hate that. And on Nov. 2, even in Southern California, it’s likely to be cool, maybe even rainy. Monday, Nov. 2, is the date I have circled for Green Enchiladas.
You want to make them on Sunday, then Monday night just pull them out and run them into a 350 oven for 30 or 40 minutes, until they’re steamy-hot all the way through.
The smallest batch you should make, even for two people – or even one person, for that matter, in which case you may REALLY need Green Enchiladas – is that which will fill a 9 by 13 Pyrex baking dish.
Brown a pound and a half of hamburger in a black skillet, seasoning to taste with salt, pepper, garlic powder, cumin and a scant teaspoon of Gebhardt’s Chile Powder. Put it aside to cool.
Make the sauce. In a large saucepan, melt two tablespoons of butter. Over medium-high heat, add three tablespoons of flour and stir with the butter to make a roux. Cook the roux just long enough to take off the raw flour taste. Add two cups of milk and stir constantly until the sauce thickens. Turn down the heat. Add two medium cans of diced green chiles and three-quarters of a pound of cubed Velveeta. Keep stirring until the Velveeta is melted and the sauce is smooth. Take the pan off the heat.
Have ready chopped onion and grated cheese. Prepare the tortillas. You need good corn tortillas. I recommend Porkyland’s, which you can mail-order, but if you have a good tortilleria near you, go for it. You will need 9 or 10. Paint both sides of the tortillas with oil. In a dry skillet, heat tortillas one by one and make a layer in the bottom of the baking dish. I like to cut one tortilla in half and snug the straight edges up to the ends of the pan. Make a layer of hamburger, chopped onion, and grated cheese. Be generous with the grated cheese. Repeat the tortilla layer, then repeat the hamburger etc. layer. Put on a top layer of tortillas. Then pour the chile-Velveeta sauce over all, getting it into all the seams and corners. Sprinkle the top with grated cheese.
Bake in a 350 oven for 40 minutes. Or cover with foil and refrigerate, as I am going to do on Nov. 1, in anticipation of Nov. 2. When it is ready, cut it into six sections with a spatula. Make a salad of shredded lettuce, chopped tomatoes, and good salsa, all mixed together, and serve on the plate with a section of Green Enchiladas. The only thing standard at your table on Nov. 2 will be the time.
September 14, 2009
Media Literacy: The new age of Incast
The World Wide Web is only the Fourth Revolution in the 16,000-odd-year history of media.
The First Revolution was the alphabet, introduced into practical use around 1500 B.C. The effect of the First Revolution was to let information travel across distances. With an alphabet, people could put ideas, fables and histories on paper, or stone, or into clay, allowing the information to be carried, or distributed, from place to place.
The Second Revolution was the printing press, introduced in commercial form by Johann Gutenberg around 1450 A.D. The printing press provided the means to reproduce many copies – and exact copies – of books very quickly, as opposed to the old, “scribal culture” tradition of reproducing a book one copy at a time, which was very slow and very expensive. So the effect of the Second Revolution was to provide the media with volume. Many historians believe the printing press has been the most important invention in the history of humanity.
The Third Revolution was the telegraph, introduced in 1844 by Samuel Morse. The telegraph provided the media with speed. Before 1844, information traveled only as fast as a man on foot, a man on a horse, or a man on a steamship or railroad train. In 1844, it became possible to move information from Point A to Point B at more or less the speed of light.
The Fourth Revolution is the Web, which we may date from about 1995. The effect of the Web is to turn the direction of information around 180 degrees. In the old, and still dominant, “broadcast culture,” information goes from a central location out to the masses. It has been a very effective technology, but also a very expensive one, and very inefficient.
In the Web age – let’s call it “Incast” – the masses come in to the information. Web information, whether it is print, audio or video, is nothing more than files on a computer, accessible globally to anyone with a phone and a computer. Incast is ridiculously inexpensive and almost totally efficient. It is the first one-to-one marketing model in the history of media. Broadcast is so expensive that not many people become broadcasters. Incast is so cheap that practically anyone can go into the media business. The result is an enormous democratizing effect. The Fourth Revolution is the reason that a publication like this one can exist.
We are now on the crest of the Fourth Revolution, headed at global high speed toward an unseen destination. One result we do know is that eventually, print and television will merge. They already have, sort of. When you watch television news, at the end of a story you are told, “For more on this story, go to our Website at www.msnbc.com.” Very soon, the merger will be complete, and your television set will work like a computer, and your remote control will also be a mouse. When you watch a news story on this new television, there will be a link right on the screen. Click on it, and you go to the in-depth, “print” version of the story. Media students already are aware that in the new journalism, they are going to have to write for both print and television: the 90-second version (about 210 words) for television, and the 4,000-word version for print.
The TV version, meanwhile, will “wait,” since it is only a file in a computer, for you to go read the in-depth story, and then click back to the TV news, which will resume where you left it. It is difficult to imagine what that simple change will mean to the media-public relationship.
Right now, we are in a primitive stage of the new relationship, like people in the 1890s who suddenly had a telephone they could use. To use it effectively, they almost had to understand how to build one. Same with the Web, that has caused enough hair-pulling to fill a billion pillows. But the Incast business model is strong, only the fourth revolution in media history, and it won’t be long before we know more than we do now.
The First Revolution was the alphabet, introduced into practical use around 1500 B.C. The effect of the First Revolution was to let information travel across distances. With an alphabet, people could put ideas, fables and histories on paper, or stone, or into clay, allowing the information to be carried, or distributed, from place to place.
The Second Revolution was the printing press, introduced in commercial form by Johann Gutenberg around 1450 A.D. The printing press provided the means to reproduce many copies – and exact copies – of books very quickly, as opposed to the old, “scribal culture” tradition of reproducing a book one copy at a time, which was very slow and very expensive. So the effect of the Second Revolution was to provide the media with volume. Many historians believe the printing press has been the most important invention in the history of humanity.
The Third Revolution was the telegraph, introduced in 1844 by Samuel Morse. The telegraph provided the media with speed. Before 1844, information traveled only as fast as a man on foot, a man on a horse, or a man on a steamship or railroad train. In 1844, it became possible to move information from Point A to Point B at more or less the speed of light.
The Fourth Revolution is the Web, which we may date from about 1995. The effect of the Web is to turn the direction of information around 180 degrees. In the old, and still dominant, “broadcast culture,” information goes from a central location out to the masses. It has been a very effective technology, but also a very expensive one, and very inefficient.
In the Web age – let’s call it “Incast” – the masses come in to the information. Web information, whether it is print, audio or video, is nothing more than files on a computer, accessible globally to anyone with a phone and a computer. Incast is ridiculously inexpensive and almost totally efficient. It is the first one-to-one marketing model in the history of media. Broadcast is so expensive that not many people become broadcasters. Incast is so cheap that practically anyone can go into the media business. The result is an enormous democratizing effect. The Fourth Revolution is the reason that a publication like this one can exist.
We are now on the crest of the Fourth Revolution, headed at global high speed toward an unseen destination. One result we do know is that eventually, print and television will merge. They already have, sort of. When you watch television news, at the end of a story you are told, “For more on this story, go to our Website at www.msnbc.com.” Very soon, the merger will be complete, and your television set will work like a computer, and your remote control will also be a mouse. When you watch a news story on this new television, there will be a link right on the screen. Click on it, and you go to the in-depth, “print” version of the story. Media students already are aware that in the new journalism, they are going to have to write for both print and television: the 90-second version (about 210 words) for television, and the 4,000-word version for print.
The TV version, meanwhile, will “wait,” since it is only a file in a computer, for you to go read the in-depth story, and then click back to the TV news, which will resume where you left it. It is difficult to imagine what that simple change will mean to the media-public relationship.
Right now, we are in a primitive stage of the new relationship, like people in the 1890s who suddenly had a telephone they could use. To use it effectively, they almost had to understand how to build one. Same with the Web, that has caused enough hair-pulling to fill a billion pillows. But the Incast business model is strong, only the fourth revolution in media history, and it won’t be long before we know more than we do now.
September 13, 2009
graynation: old enough to be historic
Okay, so now I am feeling slightly old. The Abilene Reporter-News yesterday took great pains to report that Friday night's Abilene High-Cooper High football game marked the 50th anniversary of the first game played at Shotwell Stadium in Abilene, on Sept. 11, 1959.
I played in that game. I was a junior fullback for Abilene High, and we beat San Antonio Thomas Jefferson that night, 14-12. Fifty years! And I was already 16 years old! I had to check the score in my yearbook; I remembered it as 26-12, so you see how reliable memory is. I do remember the best player on the Jefferson team: Tommy Nobis, who starred at Texas and then Atlanta in the NFL. The best player on our team was David Parks, who was an All-American at Texas Tech and All-Pro with the 49ers.
In the yearbook, 1959 looks modern. Not personally. The way kids dressed at AHS in 1959, you could mistake it for a Catholic school. For boys, the uniform was Levis, a shirt, black penny loafers, and white socks. For girls, the uniform was a dress, black suede penny loafers, and white socks. But there are color photographs, and the school, which opened in 1955, looked modern. The cars had transitioned from the black humpmobiles of the 1940s to cars with long lines and wrap-around windshields.
It's the black humpmobiles that are in my mind today. If I played in the first game at the new Shotwell Stadium, it means I also played in the last game, in December of 1958, at the old Fair Park Stadium, where Eagle teams had played since the 1920s. I find my links to the first half of the 20th century are becoming increasingly awesome. I remember thinking what a strange life it must have been for my grandmother, who rode in wagons before cars appeared. My own life assumes the same strangeness, as I check in at Facebook, remembering a day when I lived in a house with a telephone that was on a party line. A "party line," kids, meant that your phone, and others in several other homes, shared the same line. I picked up the phone many times and heard other people talking. It WAS, I guess, sort of like Facebook. I remember what a big deal it was when we got a private number. It was 7973. Later it became 4-7973. After that, we heard that phone exchanges were coming. I was excited. I had been in big cities with phone exchanges like RIverside, KLondike, FEderal, and SEquoia. I was disappointed when the phone company said our choices would be ORchard and OWen. Ick. At least we got ORchard.
Then, in the same online edition with the Abilene-Cooper story (Abilene won, 49-37), was a story about the Abilene Candy Company burning down. When I was but a boy, in those days in the first half of the 20th century, the Abilene Candy Company made the Jo-Boy candy bar, which was like a Baby Ruth but with a pink center. I loved Jo-Boys and was so impressed that they were made in my home town. The company was still in business, making candy suckers for worldwide distribution. The photos with the story showed it totally engulfed. The building was on North 3rd St., in an industrial area east of downtown.
Downtown was still downtown then. Two hotels, the Windsor and Wooten. Three movie theaters, the Paramount, Majestic and Queen. Two high-tone department stores, Minter's and Grissom's. A drugstore with a soda fountain. Head-in parking, for the black humpmobiles. Texas and Pacific steam engines huffing through the middle of town. A Christmas Parade down Pine Street. No television. No air conditioning. Bottles of milk on the front porch. No traffic roar. So quiet a place, it seems, it was.
Then came the '50s, and modernization. A shopping center. A new stadium, that I played in, and they are still playing in today. That doesn't seem so long ago. But 1949 sure does.
I played in that game. I was a junior fullback for Abilene High, and we beat San Antonio Thomas Jefferson that night, 14-12. Fifty years! And I was already 16 years old! I had to check the score in my yearbook; I remembered it as 26-12, so you see how reliable memory is. I do remember the best player on the Jefferson team: Tommy Nobis, who starred at Texas and then Atlanta in the NFL. The best player on our team was David Parks, who was an All-American at Texas Tech and All-Pro with the 49ers.
In the yearbook, 1959 looks modern. Not personally. The way kids dressed at AHS in 1959, you could mistake it for a Catholic school. For boys, the uniform was Levis, a shirt, black penny loafers, and white socks. For girls, the uniform was a dress, black suede penny loafers, and white socks. But there are color photographs, and the school, which opened in 1955, looked modern. The cars had transitioned from the black humpmobiles of the 1940s to cars with long lines and wrap-around windshields.
It's the black humpmobiles that are in my mind today. If I played in the first game at the new Shotwell Stadium, it means I also played in the last game, in December of 1958, at the old Fair Park Stadium, where Eagle teams had played since the 1920s. I find my links to the first half of the 20th century are becoming increasingly awesome. I remember thinking what a strange life it must have been for my grandmother, who rode in wagons before cars appeared. My own life assumes the same strangeness, as I check in at Facebook, remembering a day when I lived in a house with a telephone that was on a party line. A "party line," kids, meant that your phone, and others in several other homes, shared the same line. I picked up the phone many times and heard other people talking. It WAS, I guess, sort of like Facebook. I remember what a big deal it was when we got a private number. It was 7973. Later it became 4-7973. After that, we heard that phone exchanges were coming. I was excited. I had been in big cities with phone exchanges like RIverside, KLondike, FEderal, and SEquoia. I was disappointed when the phone company said our choices would be ORchard and OWen. Ick. At least we got ORchard.
Then, in the same online edition with the Abilene-Cooper story (Abilene won, 49-37), was a story about the Abilene Candy Company burning down. When I was but a boy, in those days in the first half of the 20th century, the Abilene Candy Company made the Jo-Boy candy bar, which was like a Baby Ruth but with a pink center. I loved Jo-Boys and was so impressed that they were made in my home town. The company was still in business, making candy suckers for worldwide distribution. The photos with the story showed it totally engulfed. The building was on North 3rd St., in an industrial area east of downtown.
Downtown was still downtown then. Two hotels, the Windsor and Wooten. Three movie theaters, the Paramount, Majestic and Queen. Two high-tone department stores, Minter's and Grissom's. A drugstore with a soda fountain. Head-in parking, for the black humpmobiles. Texas and Pacific steam engines huffing through the middle of town. A Christmas Parade down Pine Street. No television. No air conditioning. Bottles of milk on the front porch. No traffic roar. So quiet a place, it seems, it was.
Then came the '50s, and modernization. A shopping center. A new stadium, that I played in, and they are still playing in today. That doesn't seem so long ago. But 1949 sure does.
September 12, 2009
Wilson on the shoulders of bobble-head demagogues
Hard to say if Joe Wilson is another Joe McCarthy. He did call the President of the United States a liar during an official joint session of Congress, which is certainly a McCarthy thing to do. Don't debate the issue; attack the individual. McCarthy, a Republican senator from Wisconsin in the early 1950s, did it by claiming the target individual, whoever it happened to be, was "a Communist."
His act came to be known as "McCarthyism," one of the grimiest terms in American political history. Wrote journalist/historian David Halberstam in "The Fifties:" "(McCarthy) knew instinctively how to brush aside the protests of his witnesses, how to humiliate vulnerable, scared people. In the end he produced little beyond fear and headlines."
Joe Wilson, until this week an unknown South Carolina congressman, may or may not have those instincts, and only time will tell if he is a mouthpiece for some political operative who does. If there are any investigative reporters left in the country, I imagine they are hard at work this week, looking for such a link.
But there is another link that is obvious, and troublesome. Since Wednesday night, when Wilson shouted, "You lie!" at President Obama during his address on health care reform, the Republican right has seized on him as a hero. I say "Republican right" to distinguish that bedrock group from Republican moderates, and what several commentators (including me) have begun carefully to call "intelligent" Republicans. Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin speak for the Republican right; John McCain, who appears to acknowledge his 2008 miscalculation, speaks for the Republican moderates; and David Brooks is the best candidate for spokesman for intelligent Republicans.
The Republican right seems to seize on bobble-head demagogues named Joe. Last year, it was Joe the Plumber. This year, it is Joe the Congressman. Hard to believe, after the Joe the Plumber goofiness, that there could be a Joe the Congressman, but there he is, making headlines for abusing the presidential office, his office, and the Congress, which makes the whole new business seem so McCarthyesque.
This time, though, not in 1952, but in 2009, it looks like a reverse McCarthyism. When he shouted out (are you there, Sarah?) on Wednesday night, Joe Wilson hoisted himself onto the shoulders of millions of citizen Joe McCarthys, growing ever more comfortable in their grassroots demagoguery, whose way around debate is to accuse the President of the United States of lying, of being un-American right down to his birth certificate, of being soft on patriotism, just as McCarthy accused all Democrats of being soft on Communism. Whether he is qualified or not, Wilson may become the new McCarthy, or McCarthy surrogate. His bearers may insist. He may have only two choices: be the bedrock right's voice of Wilsonism; or resign the position and be tagged a "traitor."
The original McCarthyism imploded in 1953 when McCarthy attacked the U.S. Army with his claims of Communist "infiltration." The hearings were nationally televised, "and, when it was over," Halberstam wrote, "McCarthy had done himself in with his ugliness." He was censured by the Senate in 1954. He was an alcoholic and died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1957.
What are Americans to do about Wilsonism? It is completely necessary that Joe Wilson be censured by the Congress. It's too late now, but the President should have called him out on Wednesday night. Just a short, quiet, declarative sentence: "Shame on you, sir, in this house." And Americans are represented by an active media, which should be all over this.
As a post script, one of Joe McCarthy's best friends, and a campaign strategist for him, was a Wisconsin judge named Urban Van Susteren. His daughter is Greta, a personality on Fox News.
His act came to be known as "McCarthyism," one of the grimiest terms in American political history. Wrote journalist/historian David Halberstam in "The Fifties:" "(McCarthy) knew instinctively how to brush aside the protests of his witnesses, how to humiliate vulnerable, scared people. In the end he produced little beyond fear and headlines."
Joe Wilson, until this week an unknown South Carolina congressman, may or may not have those instincts, and only time will tell if he is a mouthpiece for some political operative who does. If there are any investigative reporters left in the country, I imagine they are hard at work this week, looking for such a link.
But there is another link that is obvious, and troublesome. Since Wednesday night, when Wilson shouted, "You lie!" at President Obama during his address on health care reform, the Republican right has seized on him as a hero. I say "Republican right" to distinguish that bedrock group from Republican moderates, and what several commentators (including me) have begun carefully to call "intelligent" Republicans. Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin speak for the Republican right; John McCain, who appears to acknowledge his 2008 miscalculation, speaks for the Republican moderates; and David Brooks is the best candidate for spokesman for intelligent Republicans.
The Republican right seems to seize on bobble-head demagogues named Joe. Last year, it was Joe the Plumber. This year, it is Joe the Congressman. Hard to believe, after the Joe the Plumber goofiness, that there could be a Joe the Congressman, but there he is, making headlines for abusing the presidential office, his office, and the Congress, which makes the whole new business seem so McCarthyesque.
This time, though, not in 1952, but in 2009, it looks like a reverse McCarthyism. When he shouted out (are you there, Sarah?) on Wednesday night, Joe Wilson hoisted himself onto the shoulders of millions of citizen Joe McCarthys, growing ever more comfortable in their grassroots demagoguery, whose way around debate is to accuse the President of the United States of lying, of being un-American right down to his birth certificate, of being soft on patriotism, just as McCarthy accused all Democrats of being soft on Communism. Whether he is qualified or not, Wilson may become the new McCarthy, or McCarthy surrogate. His bearers may insist. He may have only two choices: be the bedrock right's voice of Wilsonism; or resign the position and be tagged a "traitor."
The original McCarthyism imploded in 1953 when McCarthy attacked the U.S. Army with his claims of Communist "infiltration." The hearings were nationally televised, "and, when it was over," Halberstam wrote, "McCarthy had done himself in with his ugliness." He was censured by the Senate in 1954. He was an alcoholic and died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1957.
What are Americans to do about Wilsonism? It is completely necessary that Joe Wilson be censured by the Congress. It's too late now, but the President should have called him out on Wednesday night. Just a short, quiet, declarative sentence: "Shame on you, sir, in this house." And Americans are represented by an active media, which should be all over this.
As a post script, one of Joe McCarthy's best friends, and a campaign strategist for him, was a Wisconsin judge named Urban Van Susteren. His daughter is Greta, a personality on Fox News.
September 11, 2009
Archives: the human commitment to live
SEPTEMBER, 2006 - Fascinating, this week, to read the story by New York Times travel writer Joe Sharkey, of his experience on an airplane he believed might crash. He was aboard the executive jet, flying above the Amazon forest, that was clipped by a jetliner with 155 people aboard. The jetliner crashed, killing all on board, but Sharkey’s story tells how his damaged aircraft was able to stay airborne until they could find a landing field.
It was the first such experience I had ever read, since the same thing happened to me, almost 50 years ago. On the afternoon of Friday, Nov. 28, 1958, I was on an airplane that I believed was going to crash. For a moment, in fact, I believed it had crashed, and that I must be dead.
I was a sophomore on our district champion high school football team, the Abilene Eagles, and we were flying from Abilene, in West Texas, for a first-round playoff game against Ysleta, an El Paso suburb. We were on two chartered DC-3s, the first team and head coach on the first plane, the scrubs on the second. I was on the second, in the last seat on the right-hand side.
I loved airplanes, knew all the makes and types, liked to go to the Abilene airport and watch the Pioneer Airlines DC-3s come and go. So I knew, that at Big Spring, 100 miles west of Abilene, there was Webb Air Force Base. The base was south of us, to our left, so I got out of my seat and asked the two guys across the aisle if I could lean across and look out their window at the base. There it was, the runway perpendicular to us, maybe five miles away.
In the next instant, without any sense of anything happening, or time passing, I was stuck, spread-eagled, to the ceiling of the airplane. I couldn’t move a finger, couldn’t close my eyes. Directly below my eyes was the window I had been looking out of. Below that was the ground, brown West Texas ranch land, coming up to get me.
In another instant, again without any sense of happening or time, I was on the floor, underneath one of the guys – Graham Holland – I had been leaning over, and on top of us was a lot of stuff, including a long, large, glossy stick, red and white with black marks and numbers on it. Loving airplanes, I knew this was the stick that, at the airport, they used to measure the fuel in the wing tanks. I looked at the stick and thought: this stick is supposed to be outside the airplane. It must mean that I am outside the airplane, too, which means I must be dead. Never having been dead, it made sense that this is what it would look like to a departing spirit: just like life.
But then we started to stir, pick ourselves up. We were flying again, straight and level. It was very quiet on the airplane. The pilot, Charles L. Kageler, came on the intercom. He said we were almost hit by a T-33 jet trainer, taking off from Webb. He said he cut power to his engines, stood the DC-3 (a fabulous airplane) on its left wingtip, and dropped about 1,000 feet. That’s what stuck me to the ceiling. Kageler said the trainer missed us by about 25 feet.
We flew on to El Paso, played the next day, won, 45-0, and flew home without incident. But the people on the airplane that Friday afternoon had become members of a club who know what it is like on an airplane that is about to crash. We knew three things: your life really does pass before your eyes; the ground really does come up to get you; there is no panic, or terror. No one on the airplane yelled, or screamed; it was eerily quiet, during and after.
For 48 years, I believed the absence of terror was because of time. It happened so quickly, the brain couldn’t figure it out. The brain, being a logical instrument, strives to put patterns on everything, but things were happening too fast. I came to believe it was a form of compensation: people who were about to die at least would not die in the indignity of terror.
Now, this week, I read about Joe Sharkey’s experience, a “terrific jolt,” the sight of a wingtip sheared off and the skin of the wing peeling back, losing speed and altitude, and no visible place in the thick rain forest to land. They were in the air for 30 minutes, “the most harrowing 30 minutes of my life,” Sharkey writes. Plenty of time to figure things out. Yet, Sharkey writes: “Amazingly, no one panicked.”
So there must be something else about human beings. We – not our intellect, but our visceral selves – must understand the singularity of life, of being alive, and we are born with an instinct that says such a possession cannot, will not, be taken away. A wingtip is sheared off, the plane is going down, but that’s okay. Plenty of time left. Plenty of fight. I have witnessed some evidence of this. A person is dying, wasted by disease, yet in the last minutes, the final minute, the last seconds, the body is fighting visibly, ferociously, to stay alive, to possess its singularity, until finally it relaxes, takes a deep breath or two, and then surrenders. This thing about life in us makes us all noble. The World Trade Center victims didn’t jump to die. They jumped because it was their last fighting chance to live.
It was the first such experience I had ever read, since the same thing happened to me, almost 50 years ago. On the afternoon of Friday, Nov. 28, 1958, I was on an airplane that I believed was going to crash. For a moment, in fact, I believed it had crashed, and that I must be dead.
I was a sophomore on our district champion high school football team, the Abilene Eagles, and we were flying from Abilene, in West Texas, for a first-round playoff game against Ysleta, an El Paso suburb. We were on two chartered DC-3s, the first team and head coach on the first plane, the scrubs on the second. I was on the second, in the last seat on the right-hand side.
I loved airplanes, knew all the makes and types, liked to go to the Abilene airport and watch the Pioneer Airlines DC-3s come and go. So I knew, that at Big Spring, 100 miles west of Abilene, there was Webb Air Force Base. The base was south of us, to our left, so I got out of my seat and asked the two guys across the aisle if I could lean across and look out their window at the base. There it was, the runway perpendicular to us, maybe five miles away.
In the next instant, without any sense of anything happening, or time passing, I was stuck, spread-eagled, to the ceiling of the airplane. I couldn’t move a finger, couldn’t close my eyes. Directly below my eyes was the window I had been looking out of. Below that was the ground, brown West Texas ranch land, coming up to get me.
In another instant, again without any sense of happening or time, I was on the floor, underneath one of the guys – Graham Holland – I had been leaning over, and on top of us was a lot of stuff, including a long, large, glossy stick, red and white with black marks and numbers on it. Loving airplanes, I knew this was the stick that, at the airport, they used to measure the fuel in the wing tanks. I looked at the stick and thought: this stick is supposed to be outside the airplane. It must mean that I am outside the airplane, too, which means I must be dead. Never having been dead, it made sense that this is what it would look like to a departing spirit: just like life.
But then we started to stir, pick ourselves up. We were flying again, straight and level. It was very quiet on the airplane. The pilot, Charles L. Kageler, came on the intercom. He said we were almost hit by a T-33 jet trainer, taking off from Webb. He said he cut power to his engines, stood the DC-3 (a fabulous airplane) on its left wingtip, and dropped about 1,000 feet. That’s what stuck me to the ceiling. Kageler said the trainer missed us by about 25 feet.
We flew on to El Paso, played the next day, won, 45-0, and flew home without incident. But the people on the airplane that Friday afternoon had become members of a club who know what it is like on an airplane that is about to crash. We knew three things: your life really does pass before your eyes; the ground really does come up to get you; there is no panic, or terror. No one on the airplane yelled, or screamed; it was eerily quiet, during and after.
For 48 years, I believed the absence of terror was because of time. It happened so quickly, the brain couldn’t figure it out. The brain, being a logical instrument, strives to put patterns on everything, but things were happening too fast. I came to believe it was a form of compensation: people who were about to die at least would not die in the indignity of terror.
Now, this week, I read about Joe Sharkey’s experience, a “terrific jolt,” the sight of a wingtip sheared off and the skin of the wing peeling back, losing speed and altitude, and no visible place in the thick rain forest to land. They were in the air for 30 minutes, “the most harrowing 30 minutes of my life,” Sharkey writes. Plenty of time to figure things out. Yet, Sharkey writes: “Amazingly, no one panicked.”
So there must be something else about human beings. We – not our intellect, but our visceral selves – must understand the singularity of life, of being alive, and we are born with an instinct that says such a possession cannot, will not, be taken away. A wingtip is sheared off, the plane is going down, but that’s okay. Plenty of time left. Plenty of fight. I have witnessed some evidence of this. A person is dying, wasted by disease, yet in the last minutes, the final minute, the last seconds, the body is fighting visibly, ferociously, to stay alive, to possess its singularity, until finally it relaxes, takes a deep breath or two, and then surrenders. This thing about life in us makes us all noble. The World Trade Center victims didn’t jump to die. They jumped because it was their last fighting chance to live.
September 10, 2009
Stretch Cooking: a hundred-dollar book
If I had to guess why Amazon.com is selling a copy of my cookbook for $122.24, I would have to say it was the pecan pie.
Yes, I said $122.24. Check it out. Go to amazon.com, search “Books” for “Michael Grant’s Cookbook – Hearty Fare From a Country Kitchen,” and you will find seven available, “Used and New.” Click on that link, and there they are, offered by different booksellers across the country.
The new, never used, unopened, book is the $122.24 item. A “Used – Very Good” copy is selling for $80.94. Other used copies are available for $24.95, $24.94, and $14.74. I am grateful to my Texas associate Ray for bringing these to my attention. In his email, he said, “Better get all the extra copies out of the closet.”
I wish I could, but I’m down to one. I am studying it now, looking for clues to what would fuel the prices shown at Amazon.
As I say, the $122.24 must be the pecan pie. In addition to the eggs, dark Karo, brown sugar, and vanilla, I use butter, a square of dark baker’s chocolate and three cups of pecan halves in mine. A pecan pie CAN have too many pecans in it, but it’s a close call. I hate pecan pies that have spaces of filling between the pecans. So in my pecan pie, I make the filling work hard for an identity. I put in enough pecans so the topmost ones acquire a lightly roasted edge in the baking. With the price of pecans, you couldn’t call this a stretch recipe, although at $122.24, I couldn’t call it a stretch cookbook, either.
In the last one I made, I added, out of necessity, a new wrinkle that was well-received. When I went to add the vanilla, I discovered we were out. Instead, I used a half-teaspoon of almond extract, and a half-teaspoon of rum extract. You can’t go wrong with three cups of pecans (some lightly roasted along the edges), dark chocolate, brown sugar, butter, and rum extract, when you are baking a pie.
The $80.94 copy must be for the Texas-style brisket, though it isn’t so much a recipe as a technique. And this one IS a stretch recipe. You can make a lot of people feel happily fed with a 10-pound whole brisket-in-the-bag at $1.79 a pound, rubbed with salt and pepper and held for 12-14 hours in the slow heat and smoke of smouldering mesquite. I do mine on a Weber 22-inch kettle that I bought 35 years ago for $45. The price has gone up since then, but it’s still terrific bang for the buck, when it comes to making people happy. Don’t forget to catch the drippings to add to the sauce.
The $24.95 book is going, I figure, for the barbecue chili recipe, which starts calling to me in the cool first days of November, until I go out and smoke chuck roast and pork shoulder for several hours, then dice the meats and, with it, and the drippings, simply make chili: onion, chiles, a big can of tomatoes, cumin, chile powder and water.
You can pair barbecue chili nicely with Jim Price’s Cornbread, which I suspect must be the reason for the $24.94 copy. I admit, in the book, that it is not my recipe, but was given to me by Jim Price, a native of Childress, Texas. Take cornmeal, salt, eggs, buttermilk, cans of creamed corn, and a third of a cup of melted lard, and bake the mixture for half an hour in a black (cast-iron) skillet. It is the best corn bread I ever had.
I can’t decide about the $14.74 copy. It could be pinto beans, black-eyed peas, or green beans with bacon and potatoes. Or it could be Corn Bread Thangs! If I didn’t have my own copy, I might pay $14.74 to be able to say I served Corn Bread Thangs to company. What I really should do is dig out my copyright document, revise this book, and get back out there in the market.
Yes, I said $122.24. Check it out. Go to amazon.com, search “Books” for “Michael Grant’s Cookbook – Hearty Fare From a Country Kitchen,” and you will find seven available, “Used and New.” Click on that link, and there they are, offered by different booksellers across the country.
The new, never used, unopened, book is the $122.24 item. A “Used – Very Good” copy is selling for $80.94. Other used copies are available for $24.95, $24.94, and $14.74. I am grateful to my Texas associate Ray for bringing these to my attention. In his email, he said, “Better get all the extra copies out of the closet.”
I wish I could, but I’m down to one. I am studying it now, looking for clues to what would fuel the prices shown at Amazon.
As I say, the $122.24 must be the pecan pie. In addition to the eggs, dark Karo, brown sugar, and vanilla, I use butter, a square of dark baker’s chocolate and three cups of pecan halves in mine. A pecan pie CAN have too many pecans in it, but it’s a close call. I hate pecan pies that have spaces of filling between the pecans. So in my pecan pie, I make the filling work hard for an identity. I put in enough pecans so the topmost ones acquire a lightly roasted edge in the baking. With the price of pecans, you couldn’t call this a stretch recipe, although at $122.24, I couldn’t call it a stretch cookbook, either.
In the last one I made, I added, out of necessity, a new wrinkle that was well-received. When I went to add the vanilla, I discovered we were out. Instead, I used a half-teaspoon of almond extract, and a half-teaspoon of rum extract. You can’t go wrong with three cups of pecans (some lightly roasted along the edges), dark chocolate, brown sugar, butter, and rum extract, when you are baking a pie.
The $80.94 copy must be for the Texas-style brisket, though it isn’t so much a recipe as a technique. And this one IS a stretch recipe. You can make a lot of people feel happily fed with a 10-pound whole brisket-in-the-bag at $1.79 a pound, rubbed with salt and pepper and held for 12-14 hours in the slow heat and smoke of smouldering mesquite. I do mine on a Weber 22-inch kettle that I bought 35 years ago for $45. The price has gone up since then, but it’s still terrific bang for the buck, when it comes to making people happy. Don’t forget to catch the drippings to add to the sauce.
The $24.95 book is going, I figure, for the barbecue chili recipe, which starts calling to me in the cool first days of November, until I go out and smoke chuck roast and pork shoulder for several hours, then dice the meats and, with it, and the drippings, simply make chili: onion, chiles, a big can of tomatoes, cumin, chile powder and water.
You can pair barbecue chili nicely with Jim Price’s Cornbread, which I suspect must be the reason for the $24.94 copy. I admit, in the book, that it is not my recipe, but was given to me by Jim Price, a native of Childress, Texas. Take cornmeal, salt, eggs, buttermilk, cans of creamed corn, and a third of a cup of melted lard, and bake the mixture for half an hour in a black (cast-iron) skillet. It is the best corn bread I ever had.
I can’t decide about the $14.74 copy. It could be pinto beans, black-eyed peas, or green beans with bacon and potatoes. Or it could be Corn Bread Thangs! If I didn’t have my own copy, I might pay $14.74 to be able to say I served Corn Bread Thangs to company. What I really should do is dig out my copyright document, revise this book, and get back out there in the market.
September 07, 2009
Media Literacy: don't tread on the media
Did you know that in the United States, the mainstream media has more power than the Constitution?
The framers of the Constitution set it up that way, at the Constitutional Convention in the summer of 1787.
By 1787, newspapers had been in business more than 200 years, long enough to give publishers at least a chance to discover the media codes and how they worked. Whether they had, or not, nobody knows. You have to understand, mass media at the beginning arrived as a complete mystery. Batteries not included, some assembly required. Johann Gutenberg, when he chose the Bible as his sales tool, only knew that the Bible had a proven audience. He didn't understand why. He was a goldsmith, a tinkerer, and an entrepreneur. His role in media history was mechanical. He was a printer, not a mass media professional. There were no mass media professionals in 1452.
What Gutenberg did was establish the first link between media codes and mass media audiences. In the last half of the 15th century, and well into the 16th, that link must have been as mysterious an object as black holes have been in modern times. What is it? Why is it there? Where did it come from? What is this thing, this link, that persuades people to learn to read, just because the material is there?
It's a fascinating question, because general audiences still don't understand the link, why it's there, what it is, where it came from. The early publishers learned as they went. They didn't need to understand the codes. They only needed to know that this mysterious link rolling off their presses had great power. The politicians recognized that power almost immediately. Rulers and church leaders enjoyed reading about themselves as much as anybody, as long as they agreed with what was written. When Martin Luther, and other pesky critics of those in power, starting publishing challenges to that power, and readers gathered around those challenges in disturbing numbers, rulers and church leaders started shutting the presses down. It begged a very big question: just how great was the power of the people, in the new age of print?
Newspapers, with their popularity, followed the European migration to the Americas started by Christopher Columbus in 1492. By 1732, a stable landscape of British colonies was in place in North America, and friction had developed between the governing and the governed. The New York colony that year acquired a new governor, William Cosby. By 1733, a New York newspaper, The New York Weekly Journal, was publishing unfavorable editorials that accused Cosby of election rigging, land appropriation, and tax embezzlement.
Cosby had the Journal publisher, Peter Zenger, arrested on charges of seditious libel, "sedition" being defined as "the stirring up of discontent, resistance, or rebellion, against the government in power," and libel being "anything false published about a person that damages that person's reputation or ability to make a living."
With Cosby controlling the judges and the attorneys, Zenger appeared to have no chance. But Zenger's backers retained noted Philadelphia lawyer Andrew Hamilton, who conceived an argument that the editorials had to be confirmed as libelous, or false, before they could be judged seditious. Since the editorials were based on known facts, they could not be seditious. The truth could never be libelous. The jury agreed, Zenger was acquitted, and truth as a defense against libel provided the press a freedom it had not previously enjoyed.
The colonial leadership thought about this. Here was a newspaper, The New York Weekly Journal, so popular that it attracted advertisers, who would actually pay to place their products in the pages of the newspaper. This suggests that publishers, and merchants, by 1735 knew something of the existence of the media codes; advertising is nothing but the manipulation of media codes.
And now, after the Zenger verdict, the Journal was not only popular, it was free to print anything it wanted to, as long as it was the truth. It meant the public had an unchecked access to the flow of any information they might want, or need. The free press after the Zenger verdict democratized information, and democratized power. This was an astonishing development, in an American colonial society already forming the thought that some truths are self-evident regarding the rights of men, and can only be obtained through the consent of the governed.
That change, in the status quo, was the primary media code in this huge story, but whether the publisher or the public realized it, the other codes were there, too, all of them, as they always are, in every story, each with its own strength scale of zero to 10. Readers of the Zenger verdict story felt them as excitement, or exhilaration, or hope or fear or challenge. Very strong feelings, and very real, the same kind of reaction people have today, when they read a big story.
The stature of the newspaper as a landmark democratic institution became a daily factor in the American mood in the decades leading to revolution, war, and independence. Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, acknowledged that stature early in 1787, just before the Constitutional Convention, when he wrote: "The basis of government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."
John F. Kennedy during his presidency said a famous thing about Jefferson. In 1962, President Kennedy invited 49 Nobel Laureates to the White House. Kennedy said: "I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent and of human knowledge that has ever been gathered together at the White House – with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."
It is tempting to think that a figure of Jefferson's intellect and perception may have been among the first to become aware of, and understand, the power of media codes, and to do so at such a critical time in his country's history. He obviously believed that newspapers were the vehicle for the opinion of the people, and of course opinion – what people think and why they think it – is pure media code.
But when the framers were finished with their work in September of 1787, and offered it for ratification, you could read the Constitution all the way through, and not come across a word about newspapers, or "the press." Happily, the Constitution is brimming with the media codes themselves, which has a lot to do with the document's effectiveness and durability. It is a document that, after all, describes the laws that will apply when a free people give their consent to a democratic system of government.
Word of "the press" does not appear until the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights, and it is a famous Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for redress of grievances."
Edited down to the scope of media literacy, it reads: "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press."
Freedom of the press! Not a cornerstone of the Constitution? Just something thrown in out of left field, into an amendment? Where is the power in that?
There are three answers.
The first is in the Constitution itself. Making no mention of the press, or its freedom, the Constitution does nothing to create a free press.
The second answer is in the First Amendment. By including it there, we see it is clear that freedom of the press was in the minds of the Constitution's framers. When in the amendment they acknowledge its existence, after ignoring it in the Constitution, it must mean the framers understood that freedom of the press preceded the Constitution, and was as self-evident to them as, in another well-known Jeffersonian phrase, certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The third part of the answer is provided by the word "abridge." Defined by Webster, it means "to reduce in scope, extent, etc." This must mean that the framers saw a free press as so fundamental to a democratic society that it preceded any laws they could create, and that the laws they did create could never be used to reduce the scope of that freedom.
They gave the press permanent, vast – almost absolute – power and then placed that power in the hands of the people. They made the people the overseers of the republic. Why did they do that? What leap of faith was required?
And so we arrive at another position where it is useful, once more, to run history backwards. If you ran all the lines of United States of America history backwards, would they converge in the Constitution, or in freedom of the press? If the Bible begat mass media, did mass media beget the Constitution? Are we really a nation of the opinion of the people? Eighty years after Jefferson's quote, Abraham Lincoln spoke famously of a "new birth of freedom," of government of the people, by the people, and for the people, not perishing from the earth.
Such a government was wonderfully tailored to the newspaper business. Newspapers let the people know what the government was doing. And newspapers let the government know what the people were thinking. The role of democratized information empowered Lincoln to get into Bartlett's with another quote about the American system: "It is true that you may fool all of the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time."
At the time, Lincoln was talking about political credibility. He was also, with those words, anticipating, 150 years in advance, the media business model of the early 21st century. And the message in the next half-century is only going to make bigger headlines.
The framers of the Constitution set it up that way, at the Constitutional Convention in the summer of 1787.
By 1787, newspapers had been in business more than 200 years, long enough to give publishers at least a chance to discover the media codes and how they worked. Whether they had, or not, nobody knows. You have to understand, mass media at the beginning arrived as a complete mystery. Batteries not included, some assembly required. Johann Gutenberg, when he chose the Bible as his sales tool, only knew that the Bible had a proven audience. He didn't understand why. He was a goldsmith, a tinkerer, and an entrepreneur. His role in media history was mechanical. He was a printer, not a mass media professional. There were no mass media professionals in 1452.
What Gutenberg did was establish the first link between media codes and mass media audiences. In the last half of the 15th century, and well into the 16th, that link must have been as mysterious an object as black holes have been in modern times. What is it? Why is it there? Where did it come from? What is this thing, this link, that persuades people to learn to read, just because the material is there?
It's a fascinating question, because general audiences still don't understand the link, why it's there, what it is, where it came from. The early publishers learned as they went. They didn't need to understand the codes. They only needed to know that this mysterious link rolling off their presses had great power. The politicians recognized that power almost immediately. Rulers and church leaders enjoyed reading about themselves as much as anybody, as long as they agreed with what was written. When Martin Luther, and other pesky critics of those in power, starting publishing challenges to that power, and readers gathered around those challenges in disturbing numbers, rulers and church leaders started shutting the presses down. It begged a very big question: just how great was the power of the people, in the new age of print?
Newspapers, with their popularity, followed the European migration to the Americas started by Christopher Columbus in 1492. By 1732, a stable landscape of British colonies was in place in North America, and friction had developed between the governing and the governed. The New York colony that year acquired a new governor, William Cosby. By 1733, a New York newspaper, The New York Weekly Journal, was publishing unfavorable editorials that accused Cosby of election rigging, land appropriation, and tax embezzlement.
Cosby had the Journal publisher, Peter Zenger, arrested on charges of seditious libel, "sedition" being defined as "the stirring up of discontent, resistance, or rebellion, against the government in power," and libel being "anything false published about a person that damages that person's reputation or ability to make a living."
With Cosby controlling the judges and the attorneys, Zenger appeared to have no chance. But Zenger's backers retained noted Philadelphia lawyer Andrew Hamilton, who conceived an argument that the editorials had to be confirmed as libelous, or false, before they could be judged seditious. Since the editorials were based on known facts, they could not be seditious. The truth could never be libelous. The jury agreed, Zenger was acquitted, and truth as a defense against libel provided the press a freedom it had not previously enjoyed.
The colonial leadership thought about this. Here was a newspaper, The New York Weekly Journal, so popular that it attracted advertisers, who would actually pay to place their products in the pages of the newspaper. This suggests that publishers, and merchants, by 1735 knew something of the existence of the media codes; advertising is nothing but the manipulation of media codes.
And now, after the Zenger verdict, the Journal was not only popular, it was free to print anything it wanted to, as long as it was the truth. It meant the public had an unchecked access to the flow of any information they might want, or need. The free press after the Zenger verdict democratized information, and democratized power. This was an astonishing development, in an American colonial society already forming the thought that some truths are self-evident regarding the rights of men, and can only be obtained through the consent of the governed.
That change, in the status quo, was the primary media code in this huge story, but whether the publisher or the public realized it, the other codes were there, too, all of them, as they always are, in every story, each with its own strength scale of zero to 10. Readers of the Zenger verdict story felt them as excitement, or exhilaration, or hope or fear or challenge. Very strong feelings, and very real, the same kind of reaction people have today, when they read a big story.
The stature of the newspaper as a landmark democratic institution became a daily factor in the American mood in the decades leading to revolution, war, and independence. Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, acknowledged that stature early in 1787, just before the Constitutional Convention, when he wrote: "The basis of government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."
John F. Kennedy during his presidency said a famous thing about Jefferson. In 1962, President Kennedy invited 49 Nobel Laureates to the White House. Kennedy said: "I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent and of human knowledge that has ever been gathered together at the White House – with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."
It is tempting to think that a figure of Jefferson's intellect and perception may have been among the first to become aware of, and understand, the power of media codes, and to do so at such a critical time in his country's history. He obviously believed that newspapers were the vehicle for the opinion of the people, and of course opinion – what people think and why they think it – is pure media code.
But when the framers were finished with their work in September of 1787, and offered it for ratification, you could read the Constitution all the way through, and not come across a word about newspapers, or "the press." Happily, the Constitution is brimming with the media codes themselves, which has a lot to do with the document's effectiveness and durability. It is a document that, after all, describes the laws that will apply when a free people give their consent to a democratic system of government.
Word of "the press" does not appear until the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights, and it is a famous Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for redress of grievances."
Edited down to the scope of media literacy, it reads: "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press."
Freedom of the press! Not a cornerstone of the Constitution? Just something thrown in out of left field, into an amendment? Where is the power in that?
There are three answers.
The first is in the Constitution itself. Making no mention of the press, or its freedom, the Constitution does nothing to create a free press.
The second answer is in the First Amendment. By including it there, we see it is clear that freedom of the press was in the minds of the Constitution's framers. When in the amendment they acknowledge its existence, after ignoring it in the Constitution, it must mean the framers understood that freedom of the press preceded the Constitution, and was as self-evident to them as, in another well-known Jeffersonian phrase, certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The third part of the answer is provided by the word "abridge." Defined by Webster, it means "to reduce in scope, extent, etc." This must mean that the framers saw a free press as so fundamental to a democratic society that it preceded any laws they could create, and that the laws they did create could never be used to reduce the scope of that freedom.
They gave the press permanent, vast – almost absolute – power and then placed that power in the hands of the people. They made the people the overseers of the republic. Why did they do that? What leap of faith was required?
And so we arrive at another position where it is useful, once more, to run history backwards. If you ran all the lines of United States of America history backwards, would they converge in the Constitution, or in freedom of the press? If the Bible begat mass media, did mass media beget the Constitution? Are we really a nation of the opinion of the people? Eighty years after Jefferson's quote, Abraham Lincoln spoke famously of a "new birth of freedom," of government of the people, by the people, and for the people, not perishing from the earth.
Such a government was wonderfully tailored to the newspaper business. Newspapers let the people know what the government was doing. And newspapers let the government know what the people were thinking. The role of democratized information empowered Lincoln to get into Bartlett's with another quote about the American system: "It is true that you may fool all of the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time."
At the time, Lincoln was talking about political credibility. He was also, with those words, anticipating, 150 years in advance, the media business model of the early 21st century. And the message in the next half-century is only going to make bigger headlines.
September 06, 2009
graynation: rock n' roll quiz answers
Here are the answers to Friday's rock and roll quiz. I hope it aroused interest among the younger demographic. This was the real rock n' roll, kids.
As he was motoratin’ over the hill, who did he see? He saw Maybelline in a Coupe de Ville.
What is it that Long Tall Sally’s got? Everything that Uncle John need, oh, baby.
How you call your lover boy? Oh, Lover Boy. And if he doesn’t answer? Oh, Lover Boy. And if he still doesn’t answer? C’mere, Lover Boy!
What’ll be the day? That’ll be the day.
What ain’t there no cure for? The summertime blues.
How many candles make a lovely sight? Sixteen candles.
Ain’t what a shame? You broke my heart when you said let’s part.
What does she do when she does the Ooby Dooby? She wiggles to the left, she wiggles to the right, she does the Ooby Dooby with all of her might.
Who’s sorry now? Whose heart is aching for breaking each vow? He’s sorry now. Her heart is aching. She’s glad that he’s sorry now.
Who calls the English teacher Daddio? Charlie Brown.
Why did Little Susie fall asleep? The movie wasn’t so hot. It didn’t have much of a plot.
How black were the eyes of Felina? Blacker than night were the eyes of Felina
You know he can be found where? Sittin’ home all alone.
Who told Tchaikovsky the news? Beethoven.
They furnished off an apartment with a two-room Roebuck sale. With what did they cram the coolerator? TV dinners and ginger ale.
What can you do in lieu of stepping on my blue suede shoes? You can burn my house, steal my car, drink my liquor from an old fruit jar.
What can stop the Duke of Earl? Nothing can stop the Duke of Earl.
Well, did he ever return? No, he never returned, and his fate is still unlearned.
If you want to know if he loves you so, is it in his eyes? No, it’s in his kiss.
When do your heartaches begin? When you find your sweetheart in the arms of a friend.
Well bless my soul, what’s wrong with me? I’m itchin’ like a cat on a fuzzy tree. I’m in love. I’m all shook up.
Why do I walk the line? Because you’re mine.
What did he really want to send her? An orchid of some kind. But what could he actually send her, with all that he had in his jeans at the time? A rose and a Baby Ruth.
You load 16 tons, what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt.
Where do fools rush in? Where angels fear to tread.
Whose barn? What barn? His barn. Jerry Lee Lewis’s barn.
What do chantilly lace and a pretty face do? Make the world go round.
Who is dancing to the Jailhouse Rock? Everybody in the whole cellblock
He never ever learned to read and write so well, but how does he play the guitar? Just like ringing a bell.
Oh, please, Diana, stay where? Stay by me, Diana.
Why is a party doll all he wants? To be with him when he’s feeling wild. To be ever-loving true and fair, to run her fingers through his hair.
Who used to play around with hearts that hastened to his call? Poor Little Fool.
Gotta be what kind of music, if you want to dance with me? Rock and roll music.
As he was motoratin’ over the hill, who did he see? He saw Maybelline in a Coupe de Ville.
What is it that Long Tall Sally’s got? Everything that Uncle John need, oh, baby.
How you call your lover boy? Oh, Lover Boy. And if he doesn’t answer? Oh, Lover Boy. And if he still doesn’t answer? C’mere, Lover Boy!
What’ll be the day? That’ll be the day.
What ain’t there no cure for? The summertime blues.
How many candles make a lovely sight? Sixteen candles.
Ain’t what a shame? You broke my heart when you said let’s part.
What does she do when she does the Ooby Dooby? She wiggles to the left, she wiggles to the right, she does the Ooby Dooby with all of her might.
Who’s sorry now? Whose heart is aching for breaking each vow? He’s sorry now. Her heart is aching. She’s glad that he’s sorry now.
Who calls the English teacher Daddio? Charlie Brown.
Why did Little Susie fall asleep? The movie wasn’t so hot. It didn’t have much of a plot.
How black were the eyes of Felina? Blacker than night were the eyes of Felina
You know he can be found where? Sittin’ home all alone.
Who told Tchaikovsky the news? Beethoven.
They furnished off an apartment with a two-room Roebuck sale. With what did they cram the coolerator? TV dinners and ginger ale.
What can you do in lieu of stepping on my blue suede shoes? You can burn my house, steal my car, drink my liquor from an old fruit jar.
What can stop the Duke of Earl? Nothing can stop the Duke of Earl.
Well, did he ever return? No, he never returned, and his fate is still unlearned.
If you want to know if he loves you so, is it in his eyes? No, it’s in his kiss.
When do your heartaches begin? When you find your sweetheart in the arms of a friend.
Well bless my soul, what’s wrong with me? I’m itchin’ like a cat on a fuzzy tree. I’m in love. I’m all shook up.
Why do I walk the line? Because you’re mine.
What did he really want to send her? An orchid of some kind. But what could he actually send her, with all that he had in his jeans at the time? A rose and a Baby Ruth.
You load 16 tons, what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt.
Where do fools rush in? Where angels fear to tread.
Whose barn? What barn? His barn. Jerry Lee Lewis’s barn.
What do chantilly lace and a pretty face do? Make the world go round.
Who is dancing to the Jailhouse Rock? Everybody in the whole cellblock
He never ever learned to read and write so well, but how does he play the guitar? Just like ringing a bell.
Oh, please, Diana, stay where? Stay by me, Diana.
Why is a party doll all he wants? To be with him when he’s feeling wild. To be ever-loving true and fair, to run her fingers through his hair.
Who used to play around with hearts that hastened to his call? Poor Little Fool.
Gotta be what kind of music, if you want to dance with me? Rock and roll music.
September 04, 2009
Archives: The rock n' roll quiz.
It has been several years since I published the rock n' roll quiz. Answers will be provided in Sunday's graynation post.
As he was motoratin’ over the hill, who did he see?
What is it that Long Tall Sally’s got?
How you call your lover boy? And if he doesn’t answer? And if he still doesn’t answer?
What’ll be the day?
What ain’t there no cure for?
How many candles make a lovely sight?
Ain’t what a shame?
What does she do when she does the Ooby Dooby?
Who’s sorry now? Whose heart is aching for breaking each vow?
Who calls the English teacher Daddio?
Why did Little Susie fall asleep?
How black were the eyes of Felina?
You know he can be found where?
Who told Tchaikovsky the news?
They furnished off an apartment with a two-room Roebuck sale. With what did they cram the coolerator?
What can you do in lieu of stepping on my blue suede shoes?
What can stop the Duke of Earl?
Well, did he ever return?
If you want to know if he loves you so, is it in his eyes?
When do your heartaches begin?
Well bless my soul, what’s wrong with me?
Why do I walk the line?
What did he really want to send her? But what could he actually send her, with all that he had in his jeans at the time?
You load 16 tons, what do you get?
Where do fools rush in?
Whose barn? What barn?
What do chantilly lace and a pretty face do?
Who is dancing to the Jailhouse Rock?
He never ever learned to read and write so well, but how does he play the guitar?
Oh, please, Diana, stay where?
Why is a party doll all he wants?
Who used to play around with hearts that hastened to his call?
Gotta be what kind of music, if you want to dance with me?
As he was motoratin’ over the hill, who did he see?
What is it that Long Tall Sally’s got?
How you call your lover boy? And if he doesn’t answer? And if he still doesn’t answer?
What’ll be the day?
What ain’t there no cure for?
How many candles make a lovely sight?
Ain’t what a shame?
What does she do when she does the Ooby Dooby?
Who’s sorry now? Whose heart is aching for breaking each vow?
Who calls the English teacher Daddio?
Why did Little Susie fall asleep?
How black were the eyes of Felina?
You know he can be found where?
Who told Tchaikovsky the news?
They furnished off an apartment with a two-room Roebuck sale. With what did they cram the coolerator?
What can you do in lieu of stepping on my blue suede shoes?
What can stop the Duke of Earl?
Well, did he ever return?
If you want to know if he loves you so, is it in his eyes?
When do your heartaches begin?
Well bless my soul, what’s wrong with me?
Why do I walk the line?
What did he really want to send her? But what could he actually send her, with all that he had in his jeans at the time?
You load 16 tons, what do you get?
Where do fools rush in?
Whose barn? What barn?
What do chantilly lace and a pretty face do?
Who is dancing to the Jailhouse Rock?
He never ever learned to read and write so well, but how does he play the guitar?
Oh, please, Diana, stay where?
Why is a party doll all he wants?
Who used to play around with hearts that hastened to his call?
Gotta be what kind of music, if you want to dance with me?
September 03, 2009
Stretch Cooking: Mush, ham and red-eye gravy
Several years ago, the world was overrun by a polenta craze. It was on the lips of all who spoke or wrote about food. Finally, one evening in a nice Italian restaurant, having read so much about the trendy re-discovery of this old Italian staple, I ordered a dish that featured polenta.
I was amused. Polenta was only a smoothed-out version of corn meal mush, with butter or cheese whirled in. As a kid, I ate a ton of corn meal mush, without the butter or cheese. I liked it lumpy, which was good, because that’s the only way my grandmother would make it. We ate it mostly for breakfast, with milk or syrup or bacon sprinkled over. Nothing was better, on mornings when the blue north wind railed at the window seams and sleet froze the screen doors shut. In later years, I found that mush went with almost anything, at any meal, any time of the day, as long as it was hot. When it cooled, it ceased to be mush, and could not be restored to mush.
What you could do with it then, was cut the cold mush into squares, and fry it. Note: This is not how you make a corn bread thang. This method would yield only squares of browned, hard mush, which weren’t bad, but offered neither the flavor or the texture of a corn bread thang, which is fried hot, not cold, mush.
Its filling power, its flexibility, and its ingredients – corn meal, salt, and hot water – make mush a classic in stretch cooking lore. I assume it existed in Italy all this time, but I never heard the word, “polenta,” until I was into my 50s. When I learned what polenta was, I was glad mush had hit the big time. If “mush” were introduced into the Italian consciousness as the trendy new “polenta,” it might acquire some cache there. It’s all in the marketing. “Mush: the New Polenta.” I can see it now.
I am craving mush right now because my old friend Ray, who can rattle silverware with the best of them, sent me an email yesterday asking about red-eye gravy. He thought I had once published a recipe for red-eye gravy, which is true. It is on page 13 of “Michael Grant’s Cookbook.”
Like mush, red-eye gravy isn’t a recipe so much as a technique. It is best to start with half-inch slices of ham with some fat on the edges. Trim the fat, and in a black skillet render the fat to produce a tablespoon or so of melted fat in the skillet. Or, if the ham is totally trimmed, use olive oil, just enough to give the ham a moist, not dry, surface to touch. Brown the slices on both sides over medium heat. In the best of all worlds, you will be cooking the famous, salty, country ham from the South, but plain old ham slices from CostCo work, too. While the ham is cooking, brew a pot of coffee.
When the ham is well-browned, set it aside and add to the skillet half a cup of the coffee and half a cup of water. Purists argue that strong black coffee, straight, is the only way to prepare red-eye gravy. But I don’t think the coffee should dominate the gravy. I like a balance between the coffee’s aromatic richness and the ham’s salty bite. In fact, I lean a little bit toward the salty bite. Stir the coffee and water to bring up the browned bits in the skillet. Increase the heat and cook the gravy until it bubbles. Lower the heat, return the ham to the skillet, and simmer the slices in the gravy for five minutes.
Here’s where the mush comes in. Red-eye gravy is great on biscuits and on grits, but spooning it onto hot mush, with the ham alongside, makes it hard not to go look for your Davy Crockett cap. Boil 3 cups of water, add a teaspoon of salt, and stir in a cup and a quarter of yellow corn meal. Turn the heat to low and stir the mush until it is thick and big heat bubbles rise and “plup” through the surface.
You should also try this mush with any braised meats, stews, chili, seafood stews, black-eyes and turnip greens. My God, what time is it?
I was amused. Polenta was only a smoothed-out version of corn meal mush, with butter or cheese whirled in. As a kid, I ate a ton of corn meal mush, without the butter or cheese. I liked it lumpy, which was good, because that’s the only way my grandmother would make it. We ate it mostly for breakfast, with milk or syrup or bacon sprinkled over. Nothing was better, on mornings when the blue north wind railed at the window seams and sleet froze the screen doors shut. In later years, I found that mush went with almost anything, at any meal, any time of the day, as long as it was hot. When it cooled, it ceased to be mush, and could not be restored to mush.
What you could do with it then, was cut the cold mush into squares, and fry it. Note: This is not how you make a corn bread thang. This method would yield only squares of browned, hard mush, which weren’t bad, but offered neither the flavor or the texture of a corn bread thang, which is fried hot, not cold, mush.
Its filling power, its flexibility, and its ingredients – corn meal, salt, and hot water – make mush a classic in stretch cooking lore. I assume it existed in Italy all this time, but I never heard the word, “polenta,” until I was into my 50s. When I learned what polenta was, I was glad mush had hit the big time. If “mush” were introduced into the Italian consciousness as the trendy new “polenta,” it might acquire some cache there. It’s all in the marketing. “Mush: the New Polenta.” I can see it now.
I am craving mush right now because my old friend Ray, who can rattle silverware with the best of them, sent me an email yesterday asking about red-eye gravy. He thought I had once published a recipe for red-eye gravy, which is true. It is on page 13 of “Michael Grant’s Cookbook.”
Like mush, red-eye gravy isn’t a recipe so much as a technique. It is best to start with half-inch slices of ham with some fat on the edges. Trim the fat, and in a black skillet render the fat to produce a tablespoon or so of melted fat in the skillet. Or, if the ham is totally trimmed, use olive oil, just enough to give the ham a moist, not dry, surface to touch. Brown the slices on both sides over medium heat. In the best of all worlds, you will be cooking the famous, salty, country ham from the South, but plain old ham slices from CostCo work, too. While the ham is cooking, brew a pot of coffee.
When the ham is well-browned, set it aside and add to the skillet half a cup of the coffee and half a cup of water. Purists argue that strong black coffee, straight, is the only way to prepare red-eye gravy. But I don’t think the coffee should dominate the gravy. I like a balance between the coffee’s aromatic richness and the ham’s salty bite. In fact, I lean a little bit toward the salty bite. Stir the coffee and water to bring up the browned bits in the skillet. Increase the heat and cook the gravy until it bubbles. Lower the heat, return the ham to the skillet, and simmer the slices in the gravy for five minutes.
Here’s where the mush comes in. Red-eye gravy is great on biscuits and on grits, but spooning it onto hot mush, with the ham alongside, makes it hard not to go look for your Davy Crockett cap. Boil 3 cups of water, add a teaspoon of salt, and stir in a cup and a quarter of yellow corn meal. Turn the heat to low and stir the mush until it is thick and big heat bubbles rise and “plup” through the surface.
You should also try this mush with any braised meats, stews, chili, seafood stews, black-eyes and turnip greens. My God, what time is it?
September 01, 2009
Sept. 1: first day of the 61st grade
Today is Sept. 1, and Americans are starting another grade in school. For me, today is the first day of the 61st grade. I will learn things this year in 61st grade that I didn’t know last year, in 60th grade. I must say, being in 61st grade feels pretty awesome. That is a lot of learning.
To figure out what grade you are starting today, go back to the year you started first grade. For me, that was 1949. Realizing I started school in the first half of the last century is pretty awesome, also. There is no way I could be that old. Then, from your first-grade year, you just count up. I know there is some arithmetic way to do that in two seconds, involving some kind of n+1 formula, but in 60 grades I have never been able to learn it. I still have to do it on a piece of paper. First I list the years: 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, and so on, up to 09. Then, next to 49, I put a 1, then next to 50 a 2, and so on. Sure enough, when I reach 09, the number is 61.
For most Americans, September is the month we begin a new grade, because we were programmed that way. The school year in America traditionally began on the Tuesday after Labor Day. Now, of course, that has all changed. In the San Diego area, some grade-school kids actually started classes on July 27! Others started in August. My own journalism classes at Grossmont College started on Aug. 24. I wasn’t happy about it. I think having to go to school in August (or July!) is un-American and should be investigated.
I think the main thing I learned in 60th grade was that it really is cool, having the imagination of a six-year-old and the experience of a 65-year-old. I had been wondering about that since the 32nd grade, when I was, uh, 37 years old. That year, in 32nd grade, I had already been writing a newspaper column for awhile, and I had the six-year-old imagination all right, but on experience I was shy. I still felt like a kid, not enough accumulation of experience yet, to call it a serious accumulation. I wasn’t yet experienced enough to say in a column, “I can tell you from experience,” and expect anyone to take it seriously. Last year, in 60th grade, I turned 65, and one of the first things I noticed was, when I told someone I could tell them something from experience, 99 percent of them took me seriously.
And that’s the way it worked out. Having the imagination of a six-year-old is really only another way of saying you can think outside the box, and thinking outside the box with the experience of a 65-year-old makes a lot of the stuff out there really dazzling, the kind of stuff I couldn’t possibly have imagined at 37. It must be because there is so much more experience inside the box now, and it is experience that powers, or at least boosts, imagination. I know that at six, I could never have imagined I would have this kind of imagination to look forward to. Now, on the first day of 61st grade, who knows where imagination will take me this year?
Today, already, on the first day of 61st grade, I am learning something. I have been reading papers in my office, turned in by students who were asked to avoid all media – no books, movies, magazines, newspapers, radio, recordings, television or the internet – for 48 hours, then write about the experience. In semesters prior, I could always count on at least a third of the 30-odd students to report being able to escape the media hurricane into calmer waters, where they could reconnect with the analog world of sidewalks, parks, porches, sunshine, clouds, street and planet sounds, and idle conversation with friends. Always, they reported how pleasant it was, even though it was only an interlude, and they could not escape the media world for long, or entirely.
In this batch of papers, I can find only two who report anything about an analog experience, while a few of the others write of their good fortune at being born into a media world, and belonging to what one called “the iPod generation.” “Just look around you,” wrote one, “it’s a beautiful sight.” Am I going to learn, in 61st grade, of evidence that all our children are slowly turning inward toward media, forever?
To figure out what grade you are starting today, go back to the year you started first grade. For me, that was 1949. Realizing I started school in the first half of the last century is pretty awesome, also. There is no way I could be that old. Then, from your first-grade year, you just count up. I know there is some arithmetic way to do that in two seconds, involving some kind of n+1 formula, but in 60 grades I have never been able to learn it. I still have to do it on a piece of paper. First I list the years: 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, and so on, up to 09. Then, next to 49, I put a 1, then next to 50 a 2, and so on. Sure enough, when I reach 09, the number is 61.
For most Americans, September is the month we begin a new grade, because we were programmed that way. The school year in America traditionally began on the Tuesday after Labor Day. Now, of course, that has all changed. In the San Diego area, some grade-school kids actually started classes on July 27! Others started in August. My own journalism classes at Grossmont College started on Aug. 24. I wasn’t happy about it. I think having to go to school in August (or July!) is un-American and should be investigated.
I think the main thing I learned in 60th grade was that it really is cool, having the imagination of a six-year-old and the experience of a 65-year-old. I had been wondering about that since the 32nd grade, when I was, uh, 37 years old. That year, in 32nd grade, I had already been writing a newspaper column for awhile, and I had the six-year-old imagination all right, but on experience I was shy. I still felt like a kid, not enough accumulation of experience yet, to call it a serious accumulation. I wasn’t yet experienced enough to say in a column, “I can tell you from experience,” and expect anyone to take it seriously. Last year, in 60th grade, I turned 65, and one of the first things I noticed was, when I told someone I could tell them something from experience, 99 percent of them took me seriously.
And that’s the way it worked out. Having the imagination of a six-year-old is really only another way of saying you can think outside the box, and thinking outside the box with the experience of a 65-year-old makes a lot of the stuff out there really dazzling, the kind of stuff I couldn’t possibly have imagined at 37. It must be because there is so much more experience inside the box now, and it is experience that powers, or at least boosts, imagination. I know that at six, I could never have imagined I would have this kind of imagination to look forward to. Now, on the first day of 61st grade, who knows where imagination will take me this year?
Today, already, on the first day of 61st grade, I am learning something. I have been reading papers in my office, turned in by students who were asked to avoid all media – no books, movies, magazines, newspapers, radio, recordings, television or the internet – for 48 hours, then write about the experience. In semesters prior, I could always count on at least a third of the 30-odd students to report being able to escape the media hurricane into calmer waters, where they could reconnect with the analog world of sidewalks, parks, porches, sunshine, clouds, street and planet sounds, and idle conversation with friends. Always, they reported how pleasant it was, even though it was only an interlude, and they could not escape the media world for long, or entirely.
In this batch of papers, I can find only two who report anything about an analog experience, while a few of the others write of their good fortune at being born into a media world, and belonging to what one called “the iPod generation.” “Just look around you,” wrote one, “it’s a beautiful sight.” Am I going to learn, in 61st grade, of evidence that all our children are slowly turning inward toward media, forever?
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