Rain? Don't get your hopes up

I guess you have to be born a weather junkie, as I was, to gripe about Southern California weather. Wednesday, the forecast suggested a change (!) in the weather, calling for a windy, cloudy, day Thursday with a chance of sprinkles (!!) and more clouds and moisture for Friday.

On Thursday afternoon, sure enough, the wind rose, clouds came over, and a sprinkle of rain fell from the sky just long enough for me to raise my face and catch a couple of drops in my eyes. And with that, it was gone. Now it is Friday morning, 10 a.m. Outside there is not a cloud between here and Hawaii. There is some sprinkly weather, all right, but it is about 100 miles north of us. The good weather always goes north of us. I am a twin to Charlie Brown, and Lucy Van Pelt is the weather bureau. "C'mon, Charlie Brown, I mean it this time, it is going to rain with clouds and wind, and temperature in the 60s. I'll bring this weather, I promise, so you can go ahead and get your hopes up."

So I do, every time, and out there right now the sky is a beautiful, deep, warm, blue, and I am working up a sweat, sweeping up another splintered pile of dashed hopes. I know this is unreasonable. People spend millions of dollars to leave the East and move to Southern California for the weather. I love our weather, I really do. The East gets snowstorms, we get sunstorms. Who's to complain? Yet I have the feeling there are other Charlie Brown cousins out there this morning, wondering why they feel so grumpy.

The depressing effects of gray weather on humans is documented. Light-emitting devices have been invented and marketed to counter these effects. I have always thought such devices were silly, but no sillier, I suppose, than a device to block out sunstruck blue skies and drip water on your head. I am the reverse Joe Btfsplk. In "Li'l Abner," Joe went around with a gray, sprinkly cloud over his head. I go around in a spotlight of blue sky. When I go home to visit Texas, I always hope there will be some weather. There never is. When I moved to San Diego in 1972, God decided that was it for me. I stepped forever on the bad side of the Weather Nazi. No rain for you. No thunder, no lightning. Old friends in Texas know of my plight. When they get a thunderstorm, they actually call on the phone and let me listen.

I would never have been able to spell "Joe Btfsplk" without Google. I wonder if Al Capp, fulminating in his grave, feels betrayed by Google for providing such easy access to a secret he thought would probably be secure forever, outside of a circle of devoted comic strip scholars. With that kind of power, I would think I could Google "rain" and sit back and wait for a shower within the hour. Hm. I actually haven't tried that yet. I will go do that now, and let you know what happens. Sounds like a last resort, doesn't it?

Let computers wake up at human speed

News arrives in today's Times that the computer industry is working to introduce computers that boot up faster. This work is in response to human impatience with the time it takes a computer to boot up. Those three minutes, the impatient humans say, feel like "an eternity."

Let me go on record as believing this is not a good idea. For more than 65 years I have been operating a computer that makes the PCs and Macs look like a box of cotton wads. Operating at what researchers say is only 10 percent of its capacity, this computer provides me five, and sometimes six, senses, a huge memory cache, and an ability to turn blankness into thought into action at astounding speeds.

Yet there is one thing my computer is not very good at, and that is starting up. When I wake up in the morning, it may be not three minutes, but four or five, before I am alert enough to swing my feet over the edge of the bed and search for the floor. Then I hear my computer issuing sort of DOS commands: "Stand." "Walk." "Bathroom." "Kitchen." "Coffee." "Sit." It may be a full 10 or 15 minutes before the computer is ready to check email.

I know my computer can boot up a lot faster, but it doesn't like it. When I was in Army officer training, at 5 a.m. lights went on and voices boomed commands and threats of what would happen if we weren't outside and in ranks in 60 seconds. I think the point was to teach us that we could boot up that fast if we had to. I also knew, standing in ranks, that it would be another couple of minutes before I could point a rifle and hit anything.

Living in Southern California, I have been awakened by earthquakes, and the process was the same. Quick response, slow reaction. Computers have no choice but to jump at the first surge of electricity, but they stay groggy while circuits hook up. Functions in those moments are prioritized. So it was in the first moments after the 1994 Northridge quake: "Stand!" "Run!" "Warn children!" Not until I banged on the door of my teenaged daughter and step-daughter and, when they opened the door, followed their eyes, did I become aware that I was totally naked. I take solace, knowing they were also booting up, that they probably didn't register me very well.

I have never known, certainly never lived with, a human who could boot up in seconds, and I expect the first one I see will be in either a science fiction or an aggravation movie. It seems unreasonable to me to expect it of PCs and Macs, which, compared to our onboard models, are third-rate systems second to none.
I do feel the annoyance of being personally up to speed, then starting up my PC and twiddling my thumbs while it wakes up. It's the same annoyance we feel trying to get children out of bed.

But we have to watch what we wish for. Given the choice, considering the past decade and peering into the next, I think we're better off if we engineer computers to wake up like sleepy people, instead of engineering them to be instantly up and dressed and ready to work, thus allowing the digital age to whittle our patience even closer to the bone. We still will live in the analog world, and patience is the analog world's cartilage.

The campaign through the lens of media literacy

Some background: The rate of media illiteracy in America is about 99.5 percent. In May 2007, U.S. Dept. of Labor statistics indicated 1.07 million media professionals in an adult population (15 and over) of 240 million. The other 238.93 million Americans have received no media education because it is not a required subject in the American educational system. Media professionals work in businesses whose missions are to provide information, entertainment and persuasion products to media consumers. The products can be complex, but all are based on 12 media values and one definition. The definition: News is anything that changes, or threatens to change, the status quo. The 12 media values: conflict, progress, disaster, consequence, prominence, proximity, timeliness, human interest, novelty, sex, sensationalism and curiosity.

Here is the way a media literate sees the campaign.

Barack Obama is a natural newsmaker. He exhales news. News flies off of him the way bees fly out from the hive on the audacious mission to find sweet nectar and pollinate the world.

John McCain is plain, a hard-working uncle with a war story. As a newsmaker he is an anchor, reading news from a script, and he knows it. He suffers from crotch, which of course does not look comfortable on camera. His appearance regularly suggests the character Howard Beale from the movie "Network."

The media is the battleground on which the campaign is fought, in a long series of battles. There is little time for issues in a 24-hour media war cycle. The adversaries have the same mission, to make the most news which resolves conflict for the greatest number of viewers. The man who achieves that will win.

Obama has had a consistent advantage in the timeliness and novelty values. His being the first black American running for president will not get old. Nor, after the last eight years, will his initial campaign strategy of change. In fact change is so durable a topic that McCain's media team has worked to co-opt it.

In June, McCain realized his newsmaker disadvantages against such opposition and brought in a team of veteran media professionals from the 2004 Bush campaign. Their hard-hitting expertise helped create numerous media opportunities for McCain. Obama's lack of experience and his former associations became conflict items for the McCain team. A "celebrity" angle was tried, but didn't work very well because viewers like celebrities.

In the debates, Obama looked cool, collected and lawyerly, McCain came across as crotchety. Most of the news – polls, money, huge crowds, war, crashing economy, GOP defections – was breaking Obama's way. Then McCain made the biggest news of the campaign: Sarah Palin. She brought with her a "Sarah who?" conflict, but her novelty and sensational values were off the chart and she represented an untapped demographic.

Novelty and sensationalism erode quickly, though, and soon they needed some other value to give them legs. Palin's experience conflict was coming into news play, and into "SNL" scripts, while Colin Powell's endorsement removed Obama's experience conflict altogether. GOP crowd reactions made news and introduced a thread of dread into the campaign that McCain had to address. Obama provided the McCain team some new grist in Joe the Plumber, and Main Street, with its proximity value, became a theme that gave Palin folksy continuity in targeting Obama with an "elitist" conflict. That theme was severely compromised by the news of Palin's $150,000 campaign wardrobe.

In the closing days, the media community is wondering how McCain's team could have so badly mismanaged his newsmaking. It is the subject of a long analysis in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine.

In this media literate's view, McCain has one last hole card. He can pop. The hard-working uncle can get out from behind the anchor desk, tell his inept media managers to go to hell, take Cindy and Sarah by the hand, lean into the camera and yell, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore. I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!... You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: 'I'm mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore!'"

That will definitely make news the old-fashioned way. How it played out on election day would be the last exciting threat to the status quo of the campaign.

This view of the campaign is a simplification, as an Ibsen play or a Faulkner novel is a simplification. The advantage of literacy, in this case media literacy, in viewing these works is that it lets the viewer grasp the complexities, because he understands the shorthand.

Who knew Neiman's was on Main Street?

Well, so much for Joe the Plumber. He couldn't replace washers fast enough make the kind of money John McCain was willing to spend on outfitting his vice-presidential candidate. We won't be hearing about Joe any more.

Another silver lining: Sarah Palin won't be saying much about Main Street America any more, where the question of the day is no longer about the economy, per se, but about the GOP economy, plus speed. How long does it take to spend $75,000 in one visit to Neiman Marcus? Would the boxes fit into the kind of Main Street car that gets 35 miles per gallon?

So that's what they meant by pro-America and spreading the wealth around. I can't think of an American, starting with my wife, who would object to spending $150,000 in one month on clothes, and you have to believe that Neiman's, Sak's, Bloomingdales, Macy's, Barney's of New York, and Atelier are beaming today over McCain's spread-the-wealth campaign.

I can't believe they spent $4,716.49 in one month on Sarah's hair and makeup.
I would expect more in the way of results, but Karen didn't think that was the point. She could easily see spending $75,000 in one sitting at Neiman's, but she was totally shocked that it was possible for one woman in one month to spend $4,716.49 on her hair and makeup. No way I could have known that, as a man. I figure $1,000 a month would be outright extravagant, but the economy could be a lot better than it is now, and we still wouldn't have to worry about that.

So it is the women voters of America who have the better sense of what kind of money we are talking about here. As a man, I can understand things like knowing where the interview time went. Sarah couldn't give any interviews because she was busy shopping. She crammed for the debate from reading summaries taped to the walls of the fitting booth. She carries Trig because somebody has to carry the luggage.

But the women. Talk about a distraction. At the office, at lunch, in board rooms, playing a game of break-it-down, the things Sarah most likely bought that would add up to $75,000 in one sweep. I think it would be more fun if, instead of spending the money on Michele Bachmann's proposed study of Congress to see who is pro- or anti-America, the media studied Main Street women for their conclusions on how that much money could have been spent that fast. (Michele's hair is looking a lot better – fuller, more body – this week than it did last Friday, by the way.) McCain's men have to come up with a way to capitalize. How about, "A chick in every pot"?

What Kristol doesn't know about media elites

William Kristol in his Monday column in The New York Times says some things about media elites that cannot be left unchallenged.

I take it personally, for one thing. I hate it when anyone, William Kristol included, goes off half-cocked about who I am. I am a media elite. After 35 years in the business, I know way too much about media to be anything but an elite. Call me Mike the Media Elite. Go ahead, mock me on “Saturday Night Live.” I have written enough newspaper stories to fill several books, and I teach 200-225 students annually the principles on which, in time, they may become media elites.

Kristol says media elites like telling readers “what’s going to happen,” because it “puts the elite prognosticators ahead of the curve, ahead of the simple-minded people who might entertain the delusion that they still have a choice.”

If The New York Times gives Kristol a column to write, it means he must be some kind of media elite himself, and I cannot find a way to square that stature with his words in the last paragraph. Unless he is lying. Otherwise, he wants me to believe he understands no more of the media-public relationship than an 18-year-old freshman walking into the classroom on the first day of the semester.

One of the first principles the freshmen learn about media – in this case, journalism – is the Definition of News: “News is anything that changes, or threatens to change, the status quo.” Immediately upon learning that, students are taught that the media did not create the Definition of News. Do you know who did? PEOPLE. Most of the core principles, rules, and definitions of media were created by people long before the media existed. When the technology became available, the media came into existence because it took those people-created principles, rules, and definitions and turned them into a business.

The business was providing people – readers – with information they needed, or information they wanted. Why? Because information was not only the original human need, it was an instinct: Where’s the food? Where’s the water? Still possessed of the damnedest instinct to survive, people still insist on information, and they insist that we media elites provide it for them.

Back at the origin of these instincts, people were infatuated, perhaps not intellectually, but viscerally, by the threat to the status quo. The change to the status quo is anything that has happened. The threat to the status quo is anything that MIGHT happen. I don’t know when humans hit on the thought of the crystal ball, but I would nominate a night up under some dark, semi-protected ledge with lightning crashing, water rushing, volcanoes erupting, the ground shaking, and big mean hungry cats howling all around.

It’s not so much survival now, but humans STILL are fascinated by the threat to the status quo. Most of a later media business development, the entertainment business, is built directly on the threat to the status quo, and humans, knowing they aren’t going to get chomped, eat it up. They are addicted to it. And who do they count on to feed the addiction? The MEDIA, William! If “elite prognosticators” try to “stay ahead of the curve,” it’s because those so-called simple-minded people insist that’s where we position ourselves. They don’t like your “delusion of choice.” They would much rather know who is going to win. Millions of these people face two more weeks of actual physical agony before the election. Who do they look to for a breath of promise that it may go their way?

As a media elite, I wish the people knew why they felt this way. It would be so much better if they had some education about their role in what the media does, and why, but they don’t. It isn’t a required subject in the American educational system. It’s not healthy for the media, either. Technology has all but obliterated human patience, creating the media race to be first. U.S. Dept. of Labor statistics from May, 2007, identify about 1.5 million media professionals in the United States. That means that roughly 270 million Americans age 5 and over are functionally media illiterate. Or 270,000,001, counting William Kristol.