Animation, Film
Sunday Animation: New World
by JOHN ADAMS •
New World from oliver sin on Vimeo.
Daily Bread
Daily Bread for 1.12.14
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny, with a high of thirty-eight, and occasional gusts of wind as high as 25 mph.
Friday’s FW poll is now closed, and readers collectively picked these four teams as the most likely to win the weekend NFL games: Seattle, Denver, San Francisco, and New England. With the divisional playoffs half over, that’s a 2-0 record (both the Seahawks and Patriots having won on Saturday). In my case, it’s a 1-1 record (I went with Seattle, but also Indianapolis; it’s an understatement to say that Indianapolis fell short.)
Toronto may have a world-class miscreant for its mayor, but she also has a zoo with a polar bear cub. Cuteness doesn’t trump misconduct, but this cub’s doing his best to improve his city’s image:
On this day [January 12th] in 1888 the so-called “Schoolchildren’s Blizzard” kills 235 people, many of whom were children on their way home from school, across the Northwest Plains region of the United States. The storm came with no warning, and some accounts say that the temperature fell nearly 100 degrees in just 24 hours.
It was a Thursday afternoon and there had been unseasonably warm weather the previous day from Montana east to the Dakotas and south to Texas. Suddenly, within a matter of hours, Arctic air from Canada rapidly pushed south. Temperatures plunged to 40 below zero in much of North Dakota. Along with the cool air, the storm brought high winds and heavy snows. The combination created blinding conditions.
Most victims of the blizzard were children making their way home from school in rural areas and adults working on large farms. Both had difficulty reaching their destinations in the awful conditions. In some places, though, caution prevailed. Schoolteacher Seymour Dopp in Pawnee City, Nebraska, kept his 17 students at school when the storm began at 2 p.m. They stayed overnight, burning stockpiled wood to keep warm. The next day, parents made their way over five-foot snow drifts to rescue their children. In Great Plains, South Dakota, two men rescued the children in a schoolhouse by tying a rope from the school to the nearest shelter to lead them to safety. Minnie Freeman, a teacher in Nebraska, successfully led her children to shelter after the storm tore the roof off of her one-room schoolhouse. In other cases, though, people were less lucky. Teacher Loie Royce tried to lead three children to the safety of her home, less than 90 yards from their school in Plainfield, Nebraska. They became lost, and the children died of hypothermia. Royce lost her feet to frostbite.
In total, an estimated 235 people across the plains died on January 12. The storm is still considered one of the worst blizzards in the history of the area.
Daily Bread
Daily Bread for 1.11.14
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will b e cloudy with a high of thirty-four. Sunrise on January 11th is 7:25 AM, and sunset 4:42 PM. The moon is in a waxing gibbous phase with 83% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1908, Pres. Roosevelt dedicates the Grand Canyon as a national monument:
…Theodore Roosevelt places the Grand Canyon under public protection, declaring it a national monument. In a statement made during a visit to the Grand Canyon in 1903, Roosevelt indicated his intention to preserve one of America’s most unique natural sites. He urged Americans to “let this great wonder of nature remain as it now is. Do nothing to mar its grandeur, sublimity and loveliness. You cannot improve on it. But what you can do is to keep it for your children, your children’s children, and all who come after you, as the one great sight which every American should see.”
On January 11, 1887, a conservationist is born:
1887 – Aldo Leopold Born
On this date Aldo Leopold, a major player in the modern environmental movement, was born. A conservationist, professor, and author, Leopold graduated from Yale University and worked for the U.S. Forest Service in the Southwest. He rose to the rank of chief of operations. In 1924 he became associate director of the Forest Products Laboratory at Madison.In 1933 he was appointed chair of game management at the University of Wisconsin. In 1943, Leopold was instrumental in establishing the first U.S. soil conservation demonstration area, in Coon Valley in 1934. As a member of the state Conservation Commission, he was influential in the acquisition of natural areas by the state. His reflections on nature and conservation appear in A Sand County Almanac (1949). [Source:Dictionary of Wisconsin Biography, p.227]
City, Freedom of Speech, Liberty, New Media
An Anecdote About an Appeal to (but not of) Authority
by JOHN ADAMS •
Years ago, around when I first started writing, someone told me about a conversation that person heard about blogging. I’ll share it with you, and explain why it was, initially, hard for me to understand. The person telling me about the conversation was reputed to be especially clever, and that reputation actually made it harder for me to understand what was being said.
Clever Person: There was a conversation about your blog, between Official X and Official Y, when they first learned about it. Official X thinks it’s terrible, one of the worst things that could happen to the town. Official Y thinks it’s just wrong and unimaginable that anyone would read a blog with a pseudonymous author.
Adams: No one has to read what he or she doesn’t want to read. People are free to choose. Still, our country has a proud tradition of anonymous commentary, even before the Revolution. What people read is their choice, not mine.
Clever Person (in a slightly stronger voice): Official Y thinks it’s just wrong and unimaginable that anyone would read a blog with a pseudonymous author.
Adams: Yes, no one has to read what he or she doesn’t want to read.
(It’s at this point that I became confused. Clever Person had just repeated part of the prior observation, with emphasis. I’d heard it the first time, replied briefly, and so I didn’t understand the need for repetition. But Clever Person was said to be, well, a clever person, so I assumed there was some worthy justification for the repetition.)
Clever Person (stronger still, with particular emphasis): Official Y thinks it’s just wrong and unimaginable that anyone would read a blog with a pseudonymous author.
It was then, but not before, that I understood Clever Person’s concern: it wasn’t that someone disagreed with pseudonymous authorship, it was that Official Y disagreed with that authorship.
The reputed cleverness of my interlocutor contributed to my confusion – my mistaken assumption was that a sharp person would only care about someone else’s substantive objection, not someone else’s status. The truth of criticism, after all, should hold regardless of someone else’s role or authority.
Instead, in that moment, I saw that Clever Person may have been clever, but not so much so that someone else’s title, role, status, whatever, didn’t exert a powerful sway. In Clever Person’s mind, the criticism wouldn’t have mattered so much, I suppose, it it had come from a vagrant; it mattered because it came from supposed town notable.
There are, however, no notables, no dignitaries, no very important people, no higher or lower, no above or below. It’s a small American town, meant always to live in conditions of liberty and equality.
To see our community otherwise is to see through cloudy eyes, imagining things that do not exist.
And that, I’d say, isn’t so clever at all.
New Media, New Whitewater, Politics, Press
What the ‘Shock of Inclusion’ Means Locally
by JOHN ADAMS •
I posted yesterday on Clay Shirky’s Shock of Inclusion and New Roles for News in the Fabric of Society, published in 2010 and just as relevant today.
His essay isn’t about local media especially, but his observations are useful to assess both local news and politics.
Shirky writes about the collapse of a pipeline model of news, where professional organizations wrote and broadcast stories sent those stories downstream to be read (passively, with only limited, press-controlled opportunities for published replies) by readers or viewers.
That model’s finished – many thousands of people in each of thousands of communities have the means to publish easily and inexpensively their own views, through Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, blogs, etc. These means are a great opportunity for America, and for places like Whitewater, Wisconsin. See, along these lines, New Whitewater’s Inevitability.
The most important thing to know is that, almost without exception, those who are writing on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, blogs, etc. don’t want to become part of the old order – they don’t want a place at yesterday’s rickety table, and they’ve no taste for yesterday’s ill-prepared fare.
It’s not to become part of a fading, old-line news business, but to become part of a vastly larger and more important marketplace of ideas that these new media publishers aspire.
New media are not merely new formats; they represent a new outlook, one that produces higher standards through a vast exchange of ideas from among many different, independent publishers.
I truly like newspapers, but I have never wanted to be a reporter, wouldn’t imagine myself as one, and wouldn’t be any good at the trade in any event. I and others neither want nor need to become part of the news business – we are already citizens, for goodness’ sake, and want new arrangements, not a share in old ones.
Broadly, what does this mean for our area?
Newspapers. For happy-news, no-analysis print newspapers, new media simply mean a slow decline, and a readership increasingly old, complacent, and down-market. They’ll keep going this way until that readership fades away, with too few replacement readers.
For newspapers that aspire to be more (and in our area that’s only the Gazette), it’s sure to be a hard road. They’ve some truly smart people at the Gazette, but others who aren’t that sharp, and far too many who really don’t understand how new media have altered the landscape.
The Gazette will have the toughest time of it, because its estimation of its own role is so much greater than happy-news publications that have long since given up being more than press agents to local notables.
Their problem is made harder by being a conservative paper in a blue, working-class town. Ideological differences between the paper and many residents require an especially sharp analysis – years of a downstream, pipeline approach have left the paper too often befuddled about what its readers want, and too often taking its readers for granted.
Worse, a government-business-press coalition – a de facto editorial stance that’s just a polite description for crony-capitalist flacking – has neither popular appeal nor likelihood of practical results.
Tough times may have pushed the Gazette to feel that it needs to be supportive of major politicians and major businesses in town, but that’s the worst position to take, both ideologically and practically. In good times or bad, a city needs scrutiny of politicians and corporations, to assure high standards and respected rights for all residents.
Reading that paper and its blogs, one can guess that they’d like to sail these new waters, but don’t know how. (Ironically, newsman Scott Angus shows a markedly stronger understanding than editorialist and blogger Greg Peck.) Reading many other papers nearby, one can see that they’re not even trying.
Politicians. New media push politicians into one of three camps: (1) those who will never adapt to new media, (2) those who will pay lip service to them, and (3) those who understand new media and will profit from their understanding.
The first group includes the least-capable leaders in a city, people of limited ability who benefited from conditions of closed government. They’re incapable of improvement in their work or outlook. Mostly, this group will rely on the lowest-quality, old-style reporters to repeat unthinkingly anything that those in the group say. Since low-quality publications are waning, this group has an ever-smaller audience for their laughable lies, excuses, and shoddy work. They’ll huddle among other mediocrities, as that’s the only audience who’ll be hospitable to them.
The second group understands new media, at least in part, but having come of age in a lazier, old-media era, they’d rather pay lip-service to a more demanding critique than actually do better work. Some will retire before the pressure of a new media critique grows too much for them, others will find to their consternation that better work, not lip-service, is necessary.
The third group, one that’s destined over time to comprise most politicians and business people, both understands and will use new media effectively. They’ll be the foundation of a New Whitewater, and better communities across America.
Cats
Friday Catblogging: An Ill-Considered Jump
by JOHN ADAMS •
Daily Bread
Friday Poll: Who Wins in NFL Playoffs?
by JOHN ADAMS •
Of the remaining eight teams in the NFL playoffs, who wins? I’ll say Seattle, Indianapolis, San Franscisco, Denver.
What do you think? The poll’s below, with multiple answers possible for your four picks.
Daily Bread
Daily Bread for 1.10.14
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Friday brings a high of thirty-six and a wintry mix of rain, freezing rain, and sleet during the day.
On this day in 1861, President-elect Lincoln chooses wisely:
…William Seward accepts President-elect Abraham Lincoln’s invitation to become secretary of state. Seward became one of the most important members of Lincoln’s cabinet and engineered the purchase of Alaska after the Civil War.
A native of New York, Seward taught school in the South before returning to New York and entering politics. He became governor in 1838 and began to articulate strong anti-slavery views. Seward entered the U.S. Senate in 1849 and burst onto the national scene during the debates surrounding the Compromise of 1850. He boldly proclaimed that slavery was doomed by a “higher law than the Constitution, the law of God.” This became a catch phrase for abolitionists and Seward became known as a radical, belying his pragmatic tendencies.
Seward joined the Republican Party in the 1850s and appeared to be the leading candidate for president in 1860. However, the party went with Lincoln, feeling that he would draw more votes in the Midwest and border regions. Seward was initially reluctant to accept the position of secretary of state, as he still saw himself as the natural leader of the party and was reluctant to take a back seat to Lincoln. In fact, Seward underestimated Lincoln’s political acumen. His relationship with the president was not particularly close, but they worked well together during the war.
Seward became one of the moderate voices in the Lincoln cabinet. His careful politicking helped to counter the public perception that the administration was dominated by radicals. Although he supported the end of slavery, Seward downplayed the effects of emancipation to gain support from Democrats and conservative Republicans during the presidential campaign of 1864.
The April 1865 assassination that killed Lincoln nearly resulted in Seward’s death as well. Lewis Powell, an accomplice to John Wilkes Booth, stabbed Seward as he lay in bed recovering from a carriage accident. Seward survived, and after a summer convalescing, returned to the State Department. His final achievement came with the purchase of Alaska from the Russians in 1867. Although he considered it one of his greatest accomplishments, critics dubbed the territory “Mr. Seward’s Ice Box.” History would show that Seward’s belief in the value of Alaska was astute.
On 1.10.1883, one of the worst fires in Milwaukee claims scores of lives:
1883 – Newhall House Fire
On this date in 1883, one of America’s worst hotel fires claimed more than seventy lives when the Newhall House burned at the northwest corner of Broadway and Michigan Streets in Milwaukee. Rescued from the fire were The P.T. Barnum Lilliputian Show performers Tom Thumb and Commodore Nutt. The fire, shown here, was discovered at 4:00 a.m. on the 10th, but sources give the date variously as 1/9/1883 or 1/10/1883. [Sources: The History of Wisconsin, Vol. 3, p.452; WLHBA]
Puzzability‘s Re Solutions series ends today:
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This Week’s Game — January 6-10
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Re Solutions
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You’ll only need to keep these New Year’s resolutions for a week. For each day, we started with a word and added the two-letter chunk RE somewhere within the word to get a new word. The two-word answer phrase, described by each day’s clue, is the shorter word followed by the RE word.
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Example:
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Pumpernickel that’s been sitting around too long
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Answer:
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Bad bread
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What to Submit:
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Submit the two-word phrase, with the RE word second (as “Bad bread” in the example), for your answer.
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Friday, January 10
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New Media, Press
Shirky’s ‘Shock of Inclusion’
by JOHN ADAMS •
In 2010, Clay Shirky (then at Harvard, now at NYU) wrote about the changing nature of the news business, in a concise, insightful essay entitled, The Shock of Inclusion and New Roles for News in the Fabric of Society. It’s well-regarded and so has been oft-cited.
These four calendar years later, it’s still the best essay on the startling influence of new media on news. Shirky’s principal points are, by now, nearly axiomatic: they’re accepted as accurate almost everywhere. (Those points also explain, equally well by implication, the influence of new media on politics.)
The whole essay is well worth reading, and citing a part of it is challenging because each paragraph is so solid. Still, I’ll highlight a few main points.
How news once was, no matter how well written or spoken:
If you were in the news business in the 20th century, you worked in a kind of pipeline, where reporters and editors would gather facts and observations and turn them into stories, which were then committed to ink on paper or waves in the air, and finally consumed, at the far end of those various modes of transport, by the audience.
A pipeline is the simplest metaphor for that process, whether distribution of news was organized around the printing press or the broadcast tower….
Professional journalists still see the world as a pipeline between producers and consumers:
That pipeline model still shapes the self-conception of working professionals in the news business (at least working professionals of a certain age), but the gap between that model and the real world has grown large and is growing larger, because the formerly separate worlds of the professionals and the amateurs are intersecting more dramatically, and more unpredictably, by the day….
The news business (and implicitly politics, too) is changing irreversibly:
What’s going away, from the pipeline model, isn’t the importance of news, or the importance of dedicated professionals. What’s going away is the linearity of the process, and the passivity of the audience. What’s going away is a world where the news was only made by professionals, and consumed by amateurs who couldn’t do much to produce news on their own, or to distribute it, or to act on it en masse….
It’s hard for representatives of now-disintegrating pipeline model to accept what’s happening – it’s a shock to them:
We are living through a shock of inclusion, where the former audience is becoming increasingly intertwined with all aspects of news, as sources who can go public on their own, as groups that can both create and comb through data in ways the professionals can’t, as disseminators and syndicators and users of the news.
This shock of inclusion is coming from the outside in, driven not by the professionals formerly in charge, but by the former audience….
I’d encourage anyone who’s not familiar with Shirky to read his full essay (linked above), and when one’s interest is piqued (as it will be, I think) to consider Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators.
Tomorrow: What the shock of inclusion means, locally.
Daily Bread
Daily Bread for 1.9.14
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Thursday will be warmer: a high of twenty, with just a one-fifth chance of a wintry mix of sleet and snow in the late afternoon.
On this day in 2007, Steve Jobs announces the first iPhone:
SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 9 — With characteristic showmanship, Steven P. Jobs introduced Apple’s long-awaited entry into the cellphone world Tuesday, pronouncing it an achievement on a par with the Macintosh and the iPod.
Here’s Puzzability‘s Thursday puzzle:
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This Week’s Game — January 6-10
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Re Solutions
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You’ll only need to keep these New Year’s resolutions for a week. For each day, we started with a word and added the two-letter chunk RE somewhere within the word to get a new word. The two-word answer phrase, described by each day’s clue, is the shorter word followed by the RE word.
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Example:
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Pumpernickel that’s been sitting around too long
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Answer:
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Bad bread
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What to Submit:
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Submit the two-word phrase, with the RE word second (as “Bad bread” in the example), for your answer.
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Thursday, January 9
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City, Elections, Politics
The Spring Local Election Outlook
by JOHN ADAMS •
Whitewater’s local election list is now available, and as with most years, it’s a mostly-uncontested affair. There are no challengers for the WWUSD School Board seats, and only Aldermanic District 4 has challengers for a seat on Council. (District 4 has always produced a fair share of candidates for one office or another; it’s a politically active neighborhood.)
There’s nothing surprising among the names of those running (or those declining to run).
A reader wrote in to ask, though, how the list of candidates squares with my prediction for 2014 that, after the spring election, Council would be a bit farther to the left. My answer is that the election will have an influence both in results among those running and for how those results will influence incumbents not running this year.
Overall, Whitewater is turning slightly more blue, and I think we’ll see a bit more of that trend in Council when we look back at the end of 2014.
(I’m a third-party voter, by the way, and a particular left-right balance in Whitewater matters far less to me than does an expansive view of rights and exacting standards in the city.)
No doubt, there are at least a few people in town who have a romantic view of politics, but it’s worth mentioning that the spring primary is February 18th (not 14th). Wisconsin’s spring general elections, however, will be April 1st, confirming that at least a few within state government have a sense of humor.
Although the candidate list is unsurprising, between now and the spring general election we’re likely to hear at least one or two surprising things from one candidate or another.
All in all, it will be well worth the listening.
Anderson, Cartoons & Comics
Initially
by JOHN ADAMS •
Daily Bread
Daily Bread for 1.8.14
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Whitewater will be cold today, but not as cold: a high of five degrees, with calmer winds producing wind chill values of zero to ten below.
On this day in 1918, Pres. Wilson issued his Fourteen Points proposal:
It will be our wish and purpose that the processes of peace, when they are begun, shall be absolutely open and that they shall involve and permit henceforth no secret understandings of any kind. The day of conquest and aggrandizement is gone by; so is also the day of secret covenants entered into in the interest of particular governments and likely at some unlooked-for moment to upset the peace of the world. It is this happy fact, now clear to the view of every public man whose thoughts do not still linger in an age that is dead and gone, which makes it possible for every nation whose purposes are consistent with justice and the peace of the world to avow nor or at any other time the objects it has in view….
On January 8, 1910, hundreds of vagrants demanded compensation for snow-shoveling:
1910 – Vagrant Snow Shovelers Strike for Pay
On this date 228 vagrants were brought in to shovel snow at the Chicago & Northwestern rail yard in Janesville. Shortly thereafter, they went on strike for 25 cents an hour and better food. Two days later, they went on strike again, asking for 30 cents an hour. [Source: Janesville Gazette]
Puzzability‘s weekly series continues:
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This Week’s Game — January 6-10
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Re Solutions
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You’ll only need to keep these New Year’s resolutions for a week. For each day, we started with a word and added the two-letter chunk RE somewhere within the word to get a new word. The two-word answer phrase, described by each day’s clue, is the shorter word followed by the RE word.
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Example:
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Pumpernickel that’s been sitting around too long
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Answer:
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Bad bread
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What to Submit:
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Submit the two-word phrase, with the RE word second (as “Bad bread” in the example), for your answer.
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Wednesday, January 8
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