2311 The working family

Who are they? I was a librarian, an associate professor; my husband is just winding down his architectural practice and had a variety of titles like associate, owner, partner and sole practitioner. So what were we? Chopped liver? Didn't we work? We've been in four of the five quintiles, and trust me, we were always employed. But every time the media wants to give us a sad, sad tale about the economy, they refer to what a tough time "the working family" is having. I think it is the new term for "working class" which pushed out "lower class" which was an unacceptable euphemism for "poor." It's really tough to find a good term for a family of five with an income of $55,000. But believe it or not, in Columbus, Ohio that income will qualify you to use the food pantry (AGI $45,200 for a family of 5).

The latest one I saw was a one column front page USAToday article on housing by Noelle Knox--either yesterday or Wednesday. She wrote that nearly 70% of Americans own their own home--but that's not good, because "working families with children" have less ownership than in 1978. Sometimes I talk back to these ladies (the journalists who write human interest stories about how tough the economy is are always women--even in the Wall Street Journal), so I said to Noelle: in 1978 "working families" weren't paying cable bills or monthly cell phones charges nor were they eating out several times a week, nor did they download music or have computers to eat up the paycheck with games, e-bay charges and blogging bills. Also, Noelle, in 1978, more of these "families" started out as married couples. Not being married, even for a period of years, helps reduce income.

And of course, Noelle didn't look for real estate in Ohio where it is affordable--no, no, no. For her sad story, she had to choose the Bacaros, a "working family" both with a good income (but not college) looking for a house in LA, or San Francisco, I've forgotten which. You can buy a perfectly decent crackerbox ranch in need of complete renovation in California for half a million, which will practically buy you a new-build mansion in a Columbus suburb.

But the real give away on these economy sad stories are the "think tanks" that provide the data. They are always "The Center for . . . name your cause." I think this one was Center for Housing Policy. But if the word "justice" is in the name, look out. Policy is another. Then they really want your money. It's the only form of justice they know.

Thursday Thirteen

Here are thirteen poems I've posted on my blog over the last 2.5 years. I wouldn't expect you to read all 13, but here are some clues. Missing someone? Try #4, #7 or #8. Tired of winter? #13 is good. Ever wondered about gossip in a small town? #1. Had any really crummy jobs? Betcha can't beat #2. Do you like to paraphrase scripture? Think on #3. Nostalgia? #6, #11.

1. What I heard about you

2. Working for DeKalb Seed

3. On a theme from Habbakuk

4. The anniversary

5. Susanna looked East

6. Christmas Formal

7. Mothers of our Childhood

8. Daddy-lions

9. December 21

10. New and unread books and unopened music

11. Last day of July

12. Complementary Colors

13.The longest month


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2309 Everything's clearer now

There was a very interesting story about classroom teaching in this morning's Columbus Dispatch. A classroom in the Harrison Street Elementary School in the Big Walnut School District (Delaware County, Ohio near Columbus) is using full spectrum light bulbs and every student gets a water bottle as part of required school supplies. The teacher is fitted with a wireless microphone and there are four speakers in the room so that every child can hear the instruction easily. They are also treated to brief periods of calisthentics to stimulate their brains. This experimental classroom is based on the research of Laurence Martel, an educational consultant on reducing stress in the classroom for better learning. I remember when I gave freshman orientation to the veterinary students I would suggest that they get up periodically from the tables in the library and walk to the hall to get a drink rather than sit for hour after hour. I didn't know I was in the forefront of educational research. I thought I was just keeping them awake.

2308 Finding a human bean

Kidney beans. Lima beans. Pinto beans. Casserole beans. How do you find a human bean?

Gekko (big computer guru) says to try this Get Human Database. I didn't try it--don't know how many snapped and ugly beans you'll get. The product I am interested in wasn't listed. But it looks like it could be useful

2307 Cyclone Larry

One of the Thursday Thirteeners The Purple Giraffe, was in the path of Cyclone Larry. Here's a description from Earth Observatory with photos:

"Tropical Cyclone Larry formed off the northeastern coast of Australia on March 18, 2006. The cyclone gained power rapidly and came ashore on Queensland’s eastern coastline, where it hammered beaches with heavy surf, tore roofs off buildings, and perhaps most destructively, flattened trees in banana plantations over a wide area. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported early estimates that as much as 90 percent of the Australian banana crop may have been lost in this single storm. Since many trees have been destroyed, it may be many years before the banana industry recovers."

And if you're visiting that Earth Observatory site, take a look at the "Meddie" story. I wonder how they are going to blame this on President Bush?

2306 I want one of these

A PowerSquid for the office and a dough scraper for the kitchen. Cool tools.

The flap that didn't fly

This item was in the NYT yesterday. I'd sort of forgotten this little anti-Bushy tale from . . . December or January.

"An inquiry has found that an American public relations firm did not violate military policy by paying Iraqi news outlets to print positive articles, military officials said Tuesday. The finding leaves to the Defense Department the decision on whether new rules are needed to govern such activities."

Ah, now it's coming back to me . . .

"After disclosure of the secret effort to plant articles, angry members of Congress summoned Pentagon officials to a closed-door session to explain the program, saying it was not in keeping with democratic principles, and even White House officials voiced deep concern."

We should try planting good news about Iraq in the NYT and forget about the middle eastern media. Better yet, leak it. I read this story on-line, so I have no idea if it was buried in a hard to find section.

2304 PLO mission to Washington and the Muslim Brotherhood distribute this paper

says Alexandra at All Things Beautiful. And well they should. It's a gift from Allah. And Harvard. It's got legs and creds! The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy By John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt Working Paper Number:RWP06-011.

“To be sure, the contents of this essay are manna from heaven for all anti-Semites and enemies of the State of Israel. It provides well laid-out arguments and enough seemingly neutral 'facts' to mask once true and utterly irrational convictions as reasonable and scholarly. The left will be defending it on that basis alone, and ridicule any notion of it providing fuel for the anti-Semites' and Islamists' peddling agenda."

She's right (no pun), and I looked at some of the left bloggers she links to who are criticising not its content, but the right wing for taking notice of it and its poor scholarship.

She says: "I welcome this essay because it will lure out the anti-Semites amongst us, who have been waiting for such an excuse to dress their irrational hatred in reasonableness and fake moderation. It is our task to differentiate between those who welcome this opinion to debate the issues and those who pursue their morbid hidden agenda."

It lured at least a few to her comments section.

2303 Perhaps I should have known

One of the things I enjoyed about being a librarian was that everyday there was something new and exciting to learn. Retirement started to look good when I needed to relearn my job everyday because of evolving technology and therefore could never feel I really had a grasp of anything. Still, with the internet it is a bit like having a mega-million volume library in the attic of my garage. I didn't know that there were jobs for "curators of e-mail," did you? I suppose I should have, because often you read in these high profile legal cases, or even in all the investigations of Katrina mismanagement, that such and so was noted in an e-mail. So someone, an actual person and not just a computer, was tracking and saving things. So, if there are positions to corral e-mail and put them to bed, there must be workshops and conferences, which makes me wonder if Bachelor degrees in e-mail conservation and curation will be far behind?

"The Digital Curation Centre is pleased to announce that it will be delivering a two-day workshop on the long-term curation of e-mail messages. This event will be held in Newcastle on 24-25 April 2006.

The increasing use of e-mail has drastically changed the way that many organisations work. To provide evidential value and to ensure legal compliance, it is essential that traditional record-keeping practices are applied to the management and preservation of e-mails. This often requires a cultural change in organisational practices, which can be exceedingly difficult to implement. In addition, there are a range of technical issues that can impact the long-term viability and re-usability of e-mails. This workshop will investigate some of the organisational, cultural, and technical issues that must be addressed to provide accountability in the short term and to ensure that e-mails can be located, retrieved, accessed, and re-used over time." DCC Events

So, watch what you put in your e-mail. Someone you don't know and never intended for them to read it may be "curating" it for a court case, a tenure review or a divorce case.

2302 The war protests

Yesterday's protests of the anniversary of the start of the war were pretty predictable. Although I don't think the numbers were all that large, even world wide. (I tried several sites looking for information and came up with nothing specific--did anyone show up? If 500 protests were planned and 4 people showed up at each, that would be "thousands," right?) They were organized by people who want to destroy the United States and our booming economy--you know the drill: Socialist this and that, Communist Party aging Yahoos, and the various "justice" coalitions and anti-capitalist groups. I'm sure a few true pacifists, even sincere Christians, got suckered in. But it's an odd coalition they joined. The home-grown anti-Americans and the fundamentalist Muslims working together. The Osama and Michael dog and pony show. American Thinker has a wonderful piece on peace. I noticed it referred to at Cube, since I hadn't made all the rounds yet. He points out that these groups have never been against war when it comes to their own goals. Gosh, how many millions upon millions were imprisoned, tortured and killed under Communism in the USSR and China--forty? Fifty? Does anyone even know? Democide--death by government--is SOP under Communism. Where's the justice in "you play you pay?"

Vasko Kohlmayer writes: "It is understandable why many well-meaning citizens are worried about the course of this war, but they should carefully consider the manner in which they express their concerns. Above all, they should not fall for ploys of domestic radicals who seek to subvert America by limiting the government’s ability to fight the enemy whose consuming goal is our destruction."

2301 What could be this bad?

Conservator posts a bit of Library Journal's John Berry. A reader says, "This is Andy Rooney bad. It's local news bad. This is bachelor uncle raving after his fourth beer bad." Yup.

Monday Memories

Did I ever tell you my favorite story about Serendipity?
In 1993 I was heavy into research on the private library of an Illinois farm family. I knew what was in the library from an estate list because the owners were my grandparents who had died in the 1960s, and they had inherited some of the books of their parents who settled in Illinois from Pennsylvania in the 1850s--with books. However, it required a lot of background material about publishers, what people read and why, the role of religion, what the schools were like, etc.

I was the librarian for the veterinary medicine college at Ohio State University, some distance from the main campus. One day I was in the Main Library for a meeting and made a quick trip into the stacks. I don't know how many books were in the collection in 1993 in that one building (12 floors), but there were 4,000,000 total in the various 20+ locations to serve 50,000 students. Anyway, I went into the stacks to browse shelves--my favorite unorganized way to do research. Although I taught classes on how to do library research (there was no Web in those days and very little was digitized), I never actually used those methods myself.

I saw a book that looked interesting but was out of order and pulled it off the shelf. When I flipped through it, I saw it contained some studies on what farmers read and what books they owned during the 1920's so I took it down stairs to the circulation desk. When the clerk attempted to charge it, the computer refused, and so she looked at the record. It was already charged out--to me! It had been charged out to me since 1991 and I had never seen the book. I had probably noticed the title in a bibliography, found it in the on-line catalog, and charged it out from my office without ever seeing it.

At Ohio State, faculty and staff could charge books out from any library on campus remotely and have them mailed to our office address. Apparently this one went astray and never made it to my office and never had the charge removed. Because I was doing so much research at that time, I probably had 20-30 items on my record. We had a computer command that would renew anything we had that was overdue, so each time I did a batch renewal, I was renewing this book that I’d never seen. I don’t know what the system allows now, but in 1993 you could literally keep a book forever if no one else requested it.

What do you suppose the chances are for picking a mishelved book in a collection of four million volumes and having it already charged out to you--two years ago?

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2299 Ridiculing religion--Hayes quits South Park

Isaac Hayes, voice of Chef on South Park, has quit. Odd, he had no problem ridiculing other religions.

"South Park co-creator Matt Stone responded sharply in an interview with The Associated Press Monday, saying, "This is 100 percent having to do with his faith of Scientology... He has no problem - and he's cashed plenty of checks - with our show making fun of Christians." Last November, "South Park" targeted the Church of Scientology and its celebrity followers, including actors Tom Cruise and John Travolta, in a top-rated episode called "Trapped in the Closet." In the episode, Stan, one of the show's four mischievous fourth graders, is hailed as a reluctant savior by Scientology leaders, while a cartoon Cruise locks himself in a closet and won't come out.

Stone told The AP he and co-creator Trey Parker "never heard a peep out of Isaac in any way until we did Scientology. He wants a different standard for religions other than his own, and to me, that is where intolerance and bigotry begin."

You can watch the South Park Scientology episode here.

2298 I love this gal's name

Tara Parker Pope, the medical/science columnist, had an extensive article in the Wall Street Journal today about the mixed reviews and studies on vitamins--ran through the whole list of maybes, probably nots and NoNo's. Studies are suggesting that these mega doses some are taking may be doing more harm than good. If you eat all the colors, you’ll get most of all you need, or maybe a multi-vitamin. Some disease problems that are helped by A or C, cause other problems by encouraging other conditions like heart or cancer. $7 billion a year business. WSJ is usually a pro-business paper, but when the women write the stories, they often have a very skeptical slant. I love her name. Have written a poem about her.

Tara Parker Pope--
such a lovely name;
sing it, play it,
hang it on a rope.

Tara Parker Pope,
she of Wall Street fame;
read her, write her,
She will help you cope.

2297 I have no use for this on-line calendar

but I loved watching the demo for Airset, and if I were managing a group, and children's activities and my social life, and going crazy doing so, I'd sure give this one a try. I saw it at Joel On Software, a software developer who writes clearly about techie stuff on his blog, most of it over my head. I'll probably stick with Boogie Jack, but peek at Joel once in awhile. Billo gave him the nod.

Is the code for that plug-in that everyone's using to enter links of visitors on MM and TT free? I sure see a lot of people using it. Instead of the blogger entering the code, the reader does it. Saves a lot of time, I'm sure.

2296 Needs a bit more color

Honda has an ad "Introducing Shannon Banks. The next Chief of Surgery." An attractive African American woman about 19 or 20 is in the operating room "poised to make great contributions to medicine." The ad promotes Honda's "All-Star Challenge and "Battle of the Bands" for HBCU. Story about this and Shannon here.

The anesthetist, surgeon, O.R. nurse and patient in the ad are all white. I think we've made a bit more progress than that in the last 50 years.

Here's a funny minority ad that I've missed, but read about in Business Week. Grupo Gallegos (Hispanic advertising firm) won an award for this one: an Energizer battery ad showing an Hispanic man, with an arm transplanted from a Japanese man. He couldn't stop taking pictures with his new hand.

2295 I hate to buy shoes

They are all ugly. They are all size B or wider. If they don't have my size (8.5 AA), they bring out 9.5 or 7.5. I hate to shop for shoes. I think I know why everyone I see on the street is wearing clunky, fat athletic shoes. Today I walked into the shoe department at Kaufmann's Department store. The shoes were lovely and beautifully displayed. Be still my heart. I would have bought 10 pair in a minute. I picked up one--think it was an Anne Klein, but not sure--and took it to the help desk (or whatever it is called these days) where two young men stood. "Do you have this in a 8.5 narrow?" "We have no narrows," the American-looking clerk said. (The middle-eastern looking guy with an accent didn't know, or didn't understand.) "None at all--not in any style?" I persisted in disbelief as I looked around at the huge selection. "No. None." All the little old bag ladies you see wandering the malls are probably there looking for shoes.

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2293 Has anyone followed up on this?

Or protested the unfairness of one group making more than another?

"A white woman with a bachelor's degree typically earned nearly $37,800 in 2003, compared with nearly $43,700 for a college-educated Asian woman and $41,100 for a college-educated black woman, according to data being released Monday by the Census Bureau. Hispanic women took home slightly less at $37,600 a year.

The bureau did not say why the differences exist. Economists and sociologists suggest possible factors: the tendency of minority women, especially blacks, to more often hold more than one job or work more than 40 hours a week, and the tendency of black professional women who take time off to have a child to return to the work force sooner than others."

Reported at my blog via AP in March 2005. Story here in USAToday.

I looked, and someone had blogged about it from the left, disagreeing with the stats, natch.

2292 Ladies, take notice

A casually dressed man always looks more business-like in slacks than you do in a pants suit. You won't get to the position you want by dressing like a guy.



And fellows, that bag over your shoulder will always look like a purse, no matter what you choose to call it. If you have something to say, just come out with it.