Damn near the spring equinox

This is the morning of March 19, a day before the spring equinox, and I thought I better get pictures because the weather bureau says there is a good chance it will be cloudy tomorrow morning. I took this image before the real sunrise began because of the fog plopped into the valley and because of the contrails left by early morning flights.

I don't know if it is airliner Grand Central Station out there every morning, but the contrails show that kind of traffic present today. These flights are headed east, north, and south.

Here is the moment when the sun for several seconds is like a diamond on the rim of the world. You can see it is about to transit a horizon feature that we call Dolly's Right One at Five. I hope I can show you exactly where it comes up tomorrow, the actual equinox, but there may be clouds, you know.

And here is the almost-equinox moment of sunrise on the left, showing the distance across the horizon the sun has traveled since Dec. 21, when it rose out of Tut's eye, at the far right. As always, click on the image for a closer view. Then click the Back arrow to return here.

In San Diego, a newspaper page turns

When I started writing a column for The San Diego Union in 1978, my “hole” was 30 column-inches. When I wrote my last column in 1992, my hole had shrunk to 16 column-inches, and the paper’s pages themselves had shrunk as costs rose and revenues flattened. I took note of that in my goodbye column, saying newspapers were “trimming their newsprint sails, in an effort to stay afloat.”

The San Diego papers THEMSELVES had shrunk. In 1992, Helen Copley killed The Evening Tribune. They called it a “merger” of the Trib and the Union, but it was a mercy killing of an evening paper whose circulation had dipped below 100,000. Remember the first law of media: the media is a business. If the media doesn’t make money, it will go out of business.

So the newspaper media in San Diego was already in trouble in 1992, and that was BEFORE the Internet roared in from space and blew everything up.

It has been at least 10 years since, going out to get the paper one morning, I realized I was going out to pick up a dinosaur. Now the dinosaurs are actually toppling. Yesterday the Union was sold to a type of business called a “private equity firm.” I doubt if any of its principals can cite the First Amendment. The first analysis I read suggested that not the newspaper, but the land it sits on – 13 acres in Mission Valley, across the San Diego River from the Fashion Valley Mall – was the key factor in the sale. I can close my eyes and see a hotel there now. Hell, I don’t even have to close my eyes.

Surveys insist that Americans don’t care about newspapers much anymore, and would not miss them. The San Diegans I have encountered today contradict the statistics. My dentist’s first question to me was, “What will happen to the Union?” Ditto his dental hygienist, who went on for five minutes in support of newspapers as I waited there with my mouth open.

This, I believe, is because when push comes to shove, people back their newspapers, because the newspaper is the repository of a community’s civic, social and institutional memory. People can reconnect to that San Diego memory, going back 81 years, only by going into the newspaper’s files. Only in one place is it all in one place. To lose that would be unthinkable.

If people feel that way, how do you think newspaper people feel? Many of our files are now accessible online. I was one tiny player in the history of the Copley Press in San Diego, but a search for my files from 1983 to 1992 yields 1,384 documents. Multiply that by thousands, and there starts to appear above the building in Mission Valley a spectral congregation of journalists shaking hands and patting backs for a community memory well, if sometimes imperfectly, preserved. No one else could have done it.

Paper was our medium, on which we moved history from the city through the presses and into the streets. That will change, and it will not be easy. I am totally addicted to picking up a newspaper and sitting down with it. But paper is only a medium. Journalism is the message. It will flow on a new river. I just got a Kindle for my birthday, and it feels clumsy and awkward and restrictive, but it also looks like the journalism medium of the near future. It’s journalism, not newspapers, that communities must keep alive.

Mr. Kindle, come here, I need you

I got a Kindle for my birthday!

Karen said she wanted to give me one for Christmas, but they were out of stock. Just as well. By my birthday, Kindle 2 had been introduced, with some useful feature upgrades. Not that I could tell you what they were, or how to use them.

A "Kindle" is, of course, the book-reading hardware sold by Amazon.com. It is the debut of a new age in which paper, an excellent medium now in its second millennium of service, will be replaced by some new, flat, flexible, foldable medium on which words do not appear via impressions of ink but by the excitement of molecules. As nifty as it is to sit in the kitchen nook, command Kindle to download a book or newspaper, and receive that publication faster than you can pour a cup of coffee, I get the distinct impression that I am working with a primitive prototype.

The Kindle, to me, must be like the first telephones were to people in the 1890s living in the dawn of the telephonics age. It is a marvel unto itself, but only a starting point, the first planting of a new technology that will sprout unimaginable produce, the same way the astounding communications products of our age – including the Kindle – trace their roots back to the first primitive, prototypal, telephones.

I wonder, in the 1890s, when someone brought a telephone into our house for the first time, who I would have wanted to call first. Ceremonially, I set aside the startup instructions for the Kindle, took the Kindle off its charger, and tried to decide which writer I wanted to download first. I decided on E.B. White, the famed 20th-century essayist and author of "Charlotte's Web," and history's reigning expert on humor. "Humor can be dissected, as a frog can," White wrote, "but the thing dies in the process, and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind." Those words have guided a multitude of careers.

But Amazon has yet to provide any E.B. White titles in its inventory of Kindle availability, a features shortcoming that I am sure will be upgraded any day now. And so I moved on to Eudora Welty. Here I did slightly better, finding and downloading an anthology of Southern writers that included Miss Welty. Then I hit a snag, that developers of this new print medium technology will need to fix, or risk driving all future readers to the loony bin. In a book, you can turn to a page. In Kindle, you can't. At least not that I have yet discovered. In the anthology, if they are collected alphabetically, as I suspect they are, since the first work is that of James Agee, then I will have put a lot of miles on the Next key, and my thumb joint, before I reach Welty.

As yet, I have chosen not to do that. Instead, this primitivity invites me to look backward and forward, as I do often when I try to picture the media of the future. Since it was my 66th (!) birthday, I looked backward to 1943 and wondered what sort of state-of-the-art communications technology I might have received as a birthday gift at that time. I happen to have in my possession a couple of Life magazines from the 1940s, one from '41 and one from '42. They were huge magazines, up-to-date but also impossibly quaint, and delivered by mailmen.

There is no way to fast-forward from a 1942 Life magazine to a Kindle. The only way we could have gotten here is one day at a time. Likewise, looking forward, we must get there one day at a time. On the way, I predict (as I predicted 10 years ago) newspapers and books will be printed on a wide sheet, folded in the middle, to create in essence four pages of print. We will start on Page One, turn to Page Two, then Three and the back page, Page Four. We will press some kind of trigger in the material, and the next four pages will load.

But 66 years from now, I predict the Kindle will have evolved into a tiny chip, embedded in our audio-video neural complex, eliminating all need for external hardware such as screens and speakers. Our volume and channel controls will be managed by our thoughts. We can watch or read or listen to the content of our choice, simply by bidding it to happen.

The March Moon, almost full

Click on the images for an up-close look. What a planet we have.

Blowing concerned conservatives clear of Rush

Whether they agree or disagree with President Obama’s direction for the nation, Americans are quickly forming the opinion that his team doesn’t miss much.

For example, someone on the team last fall jotted some notes on the success of “Sarah’s Base Hardener” in continuing the work of that icon of conservatism, William F. Buckley. Buckley’s work: “I’ve spent my entire lifetime separating the right from the kooks.”

“Sarah” was, of course Sarah Palin. Quickly, she established an identity among many Americans as Billy Mays (the screeching TV pitchman) in lipstick. John McCain put her to work hardening the GOP base, and her success exceeded the lifelong hopes of William F. Buckley. Throughout the late summer and fall, “Sarah’s Base Hardener” was separating the right from the kooks in boatload numbers. It featured a secret ingredient that, when dumped into a party-full of conservatives, acted to eliminate choice. At the molecular level, it removed any molecule that didn’t look like and act like the molecule next to it. Those molecules (including David Brooks and Christopher Buckley, William’s son) rose to the top in a confused, multi-colored froth, while the base molecules, all exactly identical, sank to the bottom, so enraptured by their liberation from choice that they cried out against any agent of choice, including but not limited to Barack Obama, intoning, “Treason!” “Terrorist!” “Liar!” “Kill him!”

Rush Limbaugh was beside himself with envy and gratitude for this hardened base that cemented his natural and lucrative constituency. When Sarah visited his radio show, he told her, “I’ll tell you, I’m in a quandary here this morning. I admire you so much. I really don’t even know what to ask.”

The Obama strategists watched this, and took notes. Their particular interest was the colorful, confused froth left at the top of the GOP, and the November votes that might be extracted from it. But the ultimate national value of this froth, and how to capitalize on it, may not have occurred to them until last weekend. Or they may have just been waiting for the right opportunity, the right conditions to experiment on the froth.

Then, last Saturday, Limbaugh delivered an 85-minute speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference that was textbook hard-base Limbaugh, so textbook that it rattled the Republican National Chairman, Michael Steele, who called it “incendiary” and “ugly.” The next morning on national television, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel threw the switch. Of Limbaugh, Emanuel said: “He is the voice and the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party.”

Imagine those words passing through David Brooks’ body, and you see the colorful, confused GOP froth, separated from the hardened base, but still in the party pot with no place to go, nowhere to turn, converted instantly to live steam on being touched with the voltage of an intellectual association to Rush Limbaugh. There they are this week, a huge conservative cloud blown into the atmosphere, looking for a place to precipitate out. Buckley’s work is at last completed. And by Democrats! With a huge assist, when he selected Sarah Palin, from John McCain. Talk about reaching back and forth across the aisle.

It will be interesting in the weeks and months to come, to see how the cloud precipitates out. Wherever it is, there are some good people up there, important to this country’s near, intermediate, and distant future. I will bet you $7.50 that Obama knew that.