Ten Best of 2009.

Okay, everyone has a list and here’s mine. I’m sticking to it. Here are the ten (10) best things to come out of 2009, from the exclusive Deckchairs deck:

10. Cool writing tools for the Mac. Between the brand-new and beautifully crafted Ommwriter to The Soulmen’s Ulysses 2.0, these applications are serious tools with different flavors, functions, and features.
9. The development of Twitter from a small-time, cute messaging tool to a massive, multi-user global communication tool that helps support grass roots social change.
8. The potential, though seemingly remote as of this writing, that a new and binding agreement on climate change will come about in Copenhagen.
7. A general recognition that spending money that one doesn’t actually have is not so great.
6. In Winnipeg, the production of Strike! The Musical at Portage and Main and the construction of the new Human Rights Museum nearby.
5. New blogs about design and designing, ranging from the excellent and beautifully crafted idsgn to the busy but helpful Web Design Ledger.
4. Unusual musical collaborations like those between Vic Chesnutt, Guy Picciotto, and Silver Mt. Zion Orchestra and Jim James, Conor Oberst, and M. Ward.
3. The advancement of non-digital, non-preachy kids movies, like Fantastic Mr. Fox (along with good music and subtle wit).
2. The election of Barack Hussein Obama to President of the United States of America. ‘Nuff said.
1. The probability of possibility. And the fact that CERN’s Large Hadron Collider didn’t create a black hole yet.

Four Months.

It’s been four short months since I last wrote on Deckchairs. I want to apologize to my (few) but dedicated followers who have, during that time, consistently urged me to get my writing act together and to pay more attention to the damn thing. I don’t have much to hold up in defense of my absence. I didn’t get run through the washing machine. I didn’t win the scratch-and-win at the 7-11. I didn’t forget how to put sentences together (well, maybe a little). I simply lost the feeling for writing anything other than business proposals. That, and Twitter. Stupid Twitter, which I quite adore. According to the Twitter statosphere, I’ve tweeted 755 times, all of them brilliantly, of course.

I’ve been compelled to write because I just came back from a wonderful evening event sponsored by New Media Manitoba, where they featured a 45-minute film showcasing industry folks in the province. I was one of them and I’m so completely humbled by the whole thing. I, nervous Nelly, sat two-stories high at the IMAX theatre (note the new spelling) expounding on my travels North and my satisfaction at doing so. I’m extremely thankful for the incredible production work that Blink Works did on my segment - taking bits and pieces of visual logic, portfolio items, photographs, and their video production and making it into a stunning little vignette. It’s truly genius work and I promise to post all or part of the production here as soon as it’s available.

Thank you NMM for this and more.

Bye GM.

In the same way that I’m surprised Obama made it to the presidency, I’m amazed that General Motors has failed. (Kottke has absolutely the best series of articles in one place on the history and logic of GM’s failure.) But I’m beginning to think that, since the war in Iraq, almost nothing shocks America. To wit:

US debt stands at $11,387,277,099,643.96. That’s a lot of money.

Almost 2,500 people die or are missing after Hurricane Katrina. Cost was $90 billion.

Nearly 50 million people do not have health insurance. Even Obama balks.

North Korea launches missiles and tests nukes. The U.N. is unhappy.

Microsoft launches yet another new search tool. It’s called ‘Bing’ because of no reason.

Trillions of dollars are erased over the period of a year or so. I continue to invest in mutual funds.

Angela.

It’s snowing and raining and gray here in ol’ Winnipeg, Canada.

This pretty much captures the spirit of the world.

2009 DD45.

The Times has a fine series of guest columnists on how unlikely (and how sublime) it is that Earth would have been hit on Monday by the asteroid you see moving across the screen above.

That Great Depression.

It’s so completely difficult to stop shaking my head in amazement at the tripe being pushed out of the Bush and McCain sausage factory. Here’s a government and party that got us into the worst economic crisis since 1929 and they want to take a break until they’re feeling better.

Instead of venting further personal anger and disgust, here are more sane, intelligent voices from the past day’s news cycle:

Crash, Timothy Egan

Today, with more than 90 percent of all homeowners paying their mortgages on time and on budget, the parallel question arises: how could this minority of bad loans drag down Western capitalism? It may be news to Joe Biden — with three gaffes this week, he’s approaching a record, even for him – but Franklin Roosevelt was not yet president during the crash. Herbert Hoover was, and there we have the reason why so many people cringed when John McCain said last week that the fundamentals of the economy were sound. In his first days in office, Hoover said, “Americans are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of the land.� Oops. And just before he was swept to the dunce corner of history, Hoover said, “No one has yet starved.� At the time, people in rural America were eating brined tumbleweed and road-kill rabbits; the unemployment rate was 25 percent.

Palin’s American Exceptionalism, Roger Cohen

I’m going to try to make this simple. On the Democratic side you have a guy whose campaign has been based on the Internet, who believes America may have something to learn from other countries (like universal health care) and who’s unafraid in 2008 to say he’s a “proud citizen of the United States and a fellow citizen of the world.�

On the Republican side, you have a guy who, in 2008, is just discovering the Net and Google and whose No. 2 is a woman who got a passport last year and believes she understands Russia because Alaska is closer to Siberia than Alabama.

Would You Believe, John Marshall

One of the advantages of running a presidential campaign is that roughly half the country is deeply committed to believing or at least saying that virtually anything you do or say makes sense. And so it is here. But, look, if you were living in the real world, if you were some hotshot young executive at a Fortune 500 company trying to rise in the ranks, and you pulled some whacked crap like this, it would probably get you blackballed permanently. People would think you were either deeply unreliable or maybe just had a screw loose. And yet here he is — is he kidding? He can’t debate Barack Obama because he’s got to go to Washington and save the economy? It’s like the biggest ‘dog at my homework’ in history.

Where is the Outrage?, Garrison Keillor

Poor Larry Craig got a truckload of moral condemnation for tapping his wingtips in the men’s john, but his party proposes to spend 5 percent of the GDP to buy up bad loans made by men who walk away with their fortunes intact while retirees see their 401K go pffffffff like a defunct air mattress, and it’s business as usual. Mr. McCain is a lifelong deregulator and believer in letting brokers and bankers do as they please — remember Lincoln Savings and Loan and his intervention with federal regulators on behalf of his friend Charles Keating, who then went to prison? Remember Neil Bush, the brother of the C.O., who, as a director of Silverado S&L, bestowed enormous loans on his friends without telling fellow directors that the friends were friends and who, when the loans failed, paid a small fine and went skipping off to other things? Mr. McCain now decries greed on Wall Street and suggests a commission be formed to look into the problem. This is like Casanova coming out for chastity.

Our Troops Don’t Get a Time-Out for the Financial Crisis, Todd Soltz

When you’re Commander in Chief, I don’t think there’d be a worse signal to send to our troops in harm’s way than to say, “Hey, hold on guys. I know you’re getting killed over there, but I have to get a time-out here to deal with Wall Street.”

If troops need to multi-task without a break, is it so wrong that we demand that a potential President-in-waiting prove that he can manage a financial crisis, and still address crises around the world for 90 minutes? And, if a potential President-to-be can’t manage that, is it wrong to think that maybe he ought not just suspend a debate and the campaign, but move aside and get out of the race?

(Y)Ike.

What with the stock market crash, the Palin surge, and the all of the sabre rattling going on, I’ve found myself not able to focus on the immensity of the Ike hurricane. Like most people, I get a lot of information out of photographs and the ones at Big Picture are highly informative. Parts of Houston look like what I saw after 9/11 in New York.

Slope.

I read with some mild interest the article in the New York Times May 18 Sunday Style section called Park Slope: Where Is the Love? In it, the writer, Lynn Harris, interviews two people who I knew, James Bernard and Steven Johnson, both of whom live in Park Slope, Brooklyn, a neighborhood that I called home for almost 12 years. The sights and sounds described in the article, the “stroller moms,” the overeager shoppers at (great) gourmet shops, the general simmering of class envy, the trampling of liberal history - all of these things recalled my own fond and estranged feelings of living in a fantastic part of the world. In many ways, Park Slope was the most natural place in the world for me, a young, Jewish, artist-writer guy who wanted to celebrate New York from just slightly afar and who saw the light of the city only a few miles away as a beacon of the possible, a place where diversity was real, grit was golden, and comfort was paramount.

But the article brought up another, more immediate feeling, which I’ve been finding hard to articulate lately and especially so on this blog. In fact, I haven’t been able to post much of anything on Deckchairs lately because, from my small perch in Mittel Canada, everything appears very askew and nowhere more so than in the New York Times, the minor reflection of liberal American (or North American) culture, generally. The list of recent tragic events in other countries, including China (80,000+ dead in the earthquake), Myanmar (135,000+ dead), Iraq (more civil war), Chad (300,000+ displaced from Darfur), Darfur (150,000+ dead) - take a tired, worn-out backseat to the relishes and realities of our elections, our layoffs and our self-made housing and crises. While Ms. Harris interviewed the interviewees about a media-happy Park Slope all too willing to accept the jaundiced eye of the media, our mediated lives have ignored that which is not fully seen.

To me, it appears that modernity has changed life in North America so radically that we are now almost fully insulated from the inequities created by or evaded by our happiness. The Democratic election is a good case in point. While the number of American children who don’t have food or access to medical care continues to grow, the candidates (both Hillary and Obama) provided the equivalent of a giant yawn; instead, they focused on American “security” and the challenge of maintaining visual and policy “integrity” throughout. For Hillary, this meant catering to a blue-collar base, with whom she has absolutely nothing in common. For Obama, it meant being playing nice to everyone so that no one would be offended. The sheer obliviousness of the media and the candidates to the real issues is astounding - and outstanding in its ignorance of very recent history. It’s not that the two candidates didn’t attempt to address things like poverty, housing, medical care, racism, and America’s role in the world; they did and they did it so obliquely, with such care for their most conservative bases, that no ideas got expressed or shared. Obama’s “Change” mantra ended up sounding like a new blueberry breakfast cereal. Hillary’s “universal health care” attempts sounded like a daydream interlude between campaign stops.

What am I suggesting? I think that I’m so dismayed with the blindness of American (and Canadian, which I’ll get to later), democracy that it’s hard to even find reproach in its candidates. They’re doing the best they possibly can to walk around the very edges of the deep water we’re all in if we don’t figure out how to solve climate change and curb energy consumption at the same time (which, quite nicely, go hand in hand) while helping the poorest of the world deal with the crises that are yet to come. The shiny, happy gladtalk of American politics these days, with Obama thanking Hillary and Hillary hoping for a place near the Oval office simply reeks of inanity, a silliness so deep that it’s serious.

And yet, here’s the rub: Obama is the best candidate we’ll have in our lifetimes, probably. The New York Times is the best media vehicle we’ll have. And Park Slope is the best neighborhood one can live in. But, in many ways, we can’t afford them, as they only offer the very best that liberal culture offers and no more.

Winehouse.

I’m slowly but surely catching up on work lately. That does not mean that I’m at all caught up.

I attribute all of this to the dulcet-harsh tones of Amy Winehouse, who has just the most amazing pipes. Her “no, no, no” that greets me every time I start up Back to Black is reliably a “yes.”

Inky.

My cat of sixteen years passed away about four hours ago. It’s been nothing but difficult these past few hours. I’m filled with longing and hurt, and sadness, mostly. I loved Inky tremendously. He was with me through thick and thin, big and small - the birth of my daughter, the death of family members, the deliberations of relationships, and the demise of jobs. I feel like I was punched in the stomach right now, ready to throw up my memories and not willing to let them, or him, go.

He was born around October 31, 1992. He came to me through the window of my apartment in Albany, New York, where I was going to graduate school. In fact, he had already made a name for himself. The landlord upstairs told me about a cat and I expressed little interest. When he came around once and then twice, I took him in and kept him. And I’ve had him ever since, with the exception being when my then girlfriend took great care of him while I was studying in Poland.

He was a gorgeous friend. I spent the day with him, lying with him, holding him, petting him, trying to imagine what life would be like without him and I couldn’t. Now I can’t imagine what life was like with him. It’s as if the swinging doors of existence only swing one way. I find it so strange, so appalling, and so grotesque that I don’t know what to do with myself.

He had cancer for the past 10 months so, mostly in his paw. It led to a very circuitous track of looking for a vet that would help him and diagnose him correctly and act like they cared. In the end, I found that vet, and he administered the dose of drugs that gave him the lethal push into the ether.

I was with Inky all day, as a I said. He slightly resisted going into his cage before we left the house and, in the car, I looked back a few times to see his bright, green, lovely eyes looking at me. I think he knew what was happening, kind of. The cancer had gotten to his lungs and chest and he was wheezing and breathing heavily the past four days. Yesterday, he came downstairs to my office and let out two sounds I hadn’t heard before; they were something like a cry of pain and a call for help. I believe he was having trouble breathing coming down the stairs to see me. He plopped himself down and I attended to him. In the end, he was a supremely smart cat, often understanding what you said. He would wag his tail at me in approval today and he got up the energy to purr with me when I lied on his side with him.

But I have questions. Lots of questions. Did I put him down at the right time? Could it have been tomorrow? Was he really in pain and how much? Could it have two or three days from now? Why so soon? And why couldn’t we just hold on to him for a while?

More generally, why does all the literature say that feline euthanasia is painless (which I’m sure it was today) yet we don’t administer it to ourselves? Inky’s last tiny little meal was a bit of tuna from a Fancy Feast can. Did that animal who died to feed him suffer?

Even more generally, where is Inky right now? Is he in the stars as I imagine or in the nowhere that scares us all? What happened during his transition from here to there? Could I have done something, earlier in his life, to have prevented this from happening? What kind of world do we live in that this is what moves me?

I recognize that I’m grasping at many different straws here. This post is mostly an attempt at publicly acknowledging my grief, which is shared by my wife and child and others that knew and loved Inky. He was adorable. Sweet. Smart. Truly wonderful to behold, hug, and love.

Postscript: I found these two quotes to be helpful:

As to “ending his suffering” - one may and should do so as soon as the animal has no chance of recovery and is only suffering - (source: “Code of Jewish Law” E.H. 5:14).

Once an animal is dead, burial or cremation is permitted - (source: Exodus 22:30).

41.

Okay, I’m 41. It’s a bizarre number.

More importantly, 3 million people are voting in Texas and Gary Gygax passes away.

The good news about birthdays when you’re over 40 is that you get a free pass for the day. Forgot to do something? It’s okay. Have to take a longer bath? It’s okay. Not up for cooking tonight? It’s okay. Want to buy a new book or something? It’s okay. Short post? It’s okay.

Eclipse.

I just went outside in the -15 F weather here and looked at the crazy total lunar eclipse occurring until 12:30 a.m. It looks like a red marble, sitting high above the world, half suspended in space near two bright stars. The next total eclipse of the moon will happen in 2010.

Sleep.

My new ENT physician here point blank told me that the entire purpose of human sleep is to dream. I was shocked by the simplification and moved by its beauty. If the Surrealists were right, that we live our days in order to dream at night, then, by the Associative Property (I think), I can extrapolate the good doctor’s statement to say the following: “We live in order to dream.”

Cruisin.

I don’t understand a word of Tom Cruise’s weird, suppressed interview that is now making the rounds. The video is no longer available on YouTube, bastards, but Gawker has said that they “will not be removing it.”

Sorry I haven’t written in a while. There are too many people out there right now saying more interesting things than me.

When you’re a Scientologist, and you drive by an accident, you know you have to do something about it, because you know you’re the only one who can really help. We are the authorities on getting people off drugs. We are the authorities on the mind…. We are the way to happiness. We can bring peace and unite cultures. Now is the time. Being a Scientologist. People are turning to you. If you are a Scientologist, you see things the way they are, in all their glory, in all their complexity… It’s rough and tumble. It’s wild and woolly. It’s a blast. It really is. It is fun. Because damn it, there is nothing better than going out there and fighting the fight, and suddenly you see — boom! — things are better. I want to know that I’ve done everything I can do, every day… I do what I can. And I do it the way I do everything.

Sterling.

I’m sitting here on our front porch, writing and watching. It’s an amazing 20 degrees Celsius (68 Farhenheit) here and the earth feels, for some and other reasons, sterling.

The light on the freshly mowed lawns look silver in the deep shadowed air. The horizon, from what little I can see of it, holds off far into the distance, a gray streak rising above the crowded trees out West. If I squint my eyes, I can almost see the sun, which is shining against the windows bright white with halos of summer gold. The breeze is barely perceptable, colored by the light of day. I love this feeling. The air uncirculating yet it’s unstifling and the stillness of the day is only cut by the traffic running on the busy street only doors down. On the tops of the cars there is a glint, a cover of brightness that stings the eyes for a moment and then falls away. This glint and glinting, it’s what dreams are made of.

The trees have lost their leaves so there’s no faking it now; this is not summer. It is Fall.

But it’s a Fall day that reminds of me of childhood days back East, or at least, college days in New England. There, the leaves would fall more slowly but, with a light jacket and a good book, the entire afternoon would feel this way. Calm with cars. Light given off grass. Certainty surrounding uncertainty and the aquisition of tainted knowledge.

And I realize now another reason why I’m relishing this moment and writing about this moment. It’s this: there is no moralizing, no mechanism or politics around the description of nature. It is and it will always will be. And it’s true.

Cat's Cradle.

My cat is dying. It’s a slow, probably painful, dying. A few months ago, he gained a small, weird sore on his front paw and it didn’t heal. It was weird: bloody on occasion, crusty on others, green on others. It changes constantly. I’ve taken Inky to one vet and then another and then another. The first one I went to was okay. Honest and trying, he ultimately recommended I talk with a veterinary surgeon to have his paw removed. But at 15 or so, it’s doubtful he would make it through that surgery; or so says the fourth vet we’ve seen and I think he’s right. At this point, it’s palliative care. It’s hard to know how far the cancer has spread from his paw, though it’s definitely spread. An x-ray shows that it’s near his heart. This has been going on for about six months now and it can’t be painless for him. We’re doing a “pulsing” regimen of antibiotics to keep the infection from overwhelming him and now he’s also on daily pain relief drops. Inky is the smartest cat I’ve owned or seen. He knows what is happening, I think, and he’s taking it on like the tough guy I know he is.

Stars.

I bought the new Stars album the other day. It’s okay. It sounds like they learned, somewhere on the wide road between their home in Toronto and their fans in the States, that they need to take themselves seriously. I’ve met one of their managers but I’m sure it’s not her fault.

In the August 30, 2007, New Yorker, David Owen writes about humanity’s lack of contact with the heavens that have been with us since forever, before it all. “And civilization’s assuault on the stars has consequences far beyond its impact on astronomers. Excessive, poorly designed outdoor lighting wastes electricity, imperils human health and safety, disturbs natural habitats, and, increasingly, deprives many of us of a direct relationship with the nighttime sky, which throughout human history has been a powerful source of reflection, inspiration, discovery, and plain old jaw-dropping, wonder.”

Adam Gopnik, another of my favorite writers, in the same issue speaks of Philip K. Dick’s new relevance today, despite his death in the early 1980s. Gopnik writes about the central metaphor of Dick’s work: “The social arrangement of power is always that of a brute oligarchic minority forcing its will on a numbed population, with amusements the daily meal and brutality the implicity threat; for all that has changed technologically, that fatal pattern has never really altered.” And this: “The vision of an unending struggle between a humanity longing for a fuller love it always senses but can’t quite see, and a deranged cult of violence eternally presenting itself as necessary and real—this thought today does not seem exactly crazy.”

Today, Google announced that users of Google Earth could now see the stars above their location with the application’s latest version. This is perhaps the last way humans will see the heavens above.

1/16 of a Second.

I saw a recent documentary in which the earth’s history was represented by a 24-hour clock. If the planet is at Midnight now, bacteria have filled the planet with oxygen since 8:00 this morning. The dinosaurs came on the scene around 9:30 pm. Humans entered about 30 seconds ago. By this scale, I figure we polluted the planet in the last 1/16 of a second.

Armed.

I returned today from a trip back East, to both Philadelphia and New York. On my flight from Philly to Minneapolis, I got to sit with an U.S. Army medic and soldier who was just coming back, hours ago, from Baghdad. We had a three-hour long, rambling conversation about the United States, Iraq, the future of the war, and media coverage. I’m not as bleary-eyed as he was, but I did get up at 3:30 am. Here is what I learned:

A lot of soldiers in Iraq, despite 7 years under President Bush, blame President Clinton for having done very little in the 1990s to stem and unroot Al Quaeda. The USS Cole was a defining moment in this history - many soldiers feel he was diddling around while fundamentalists in Afghanistan were gaining strength and sway. I didn’t ask about the relationship between 9/11 and Iraq, but the implication from this one soldier was that neither would have happened had the United States taken out Al Aqaeda ten years ago.

My soldier friend also told me that “CNN is a joke” - and that every single news vehicle (from any country) doesn’t have the big or little story on Iraq. He said he read the New York Times online every day and that it didn’t even begin to scratch the stories in and around Baghdad. He did say, a number of times, that he felt the U.S. was doing a lot of good there, though I kind of felt he was saying this out of some sense of obligation to those still serving there.

Another issue he brought up was the status of soldiers. The overall care he recieved in Baghdad was excellent, he told me. Every evening, they would have 31 flavors of Baskin Robbins ice cream available for dessert. The hospitals were superb and the medical care was top notch, for soldiers. In his estimation (he worked in the main U.S. hospital in Baghdad), 99% of all U.S. and Iraqi injuries were from IEDs and suicide bombers. There was absolutely nothing the U.S. could do to stop these, he explained, and there is no end in sight for a decrease in insurgency attacks.

I asked about the draft. He agreed with me that the U.S. will, indeed, have to institute a draft pretty soon if recruits aren’t being gained. Even the $40,000 sign up fee, the educational benefits, and quick-start career opportunity of the Army are not convincing young Americans to serve their country.

Perhaps most interesting was his photographs. He had taken many dozens of photos and showed them to me and other passenger on his laptop. He did not shoot blood or gore but he did clearly show the damage that tanks and other armored vehicles have sustained from various IEDs and bombs: the 5-inch thick glass windows pierced by a bomb, the 4-inch thick gash in the side of a Humvee, the demolished vehicles in the middle of the desert that are already sand-covered and useless. But he also showed me photographs of some of the holiest Christian and Muslim shrines in the country - places he went to with obvious risk. These were thousands of years old; some were pockmarked with recent bullets and armament while others stood intact.

After we deplaned, I ran into him again in the terminal. He said that people, in the past 12 hours since he’s returned, have said to him, over and over again, “Thank you.” And then he shook my hand and said to me, “Peace be with you.”

Jennifer Michael Hecht.

I listened to Jennifer Michael Hecht today (on WNYC.org (you'll need the Real player to listen)) speak about life, love, and the universe and I was immediately taken. Her new book, The Happiness Myth, appears to fully attempt to debunk the tropes upon which we base most of our lives in the West. On the show, she essentially collapsed the difference between opium and Prozac, explaining that these two drugs are different sides of the same coin. Prozac, however, allows us to drive our cars and be productive citizens while being happy. She also talked about the relatonship between faith and certainty, doubt and discovery, and lefty culture.

I enjoyed listening to her: her New Yorkish accent, her overeducated brand of commentary, her youngish sense of possibility (and within that, a sharp capacity for critique and reason), and her aptitude for telling it straight. Ms. Hecht seems like someone I should have known when I lived in Brooklyn; she could have saved me from many of my consumerist and theoretical yearnings. I'll read her book instead. Books are the last resort of the rascal.

Pesach, First.

I spent almost two hours today shopping for Passover foods. First, I went to Sobey's, which being located in a relatively Jewish neighborhood here, and they had some things I needed—overly expensive macaroons, matzo, matzo ball mix. Then it was on to Safeway, which had a nicer display of Passover fare. And then I found some dill, horseradish, and parsley, all key ingredients for a dinner. Granted, I was shopping late, but the selection wasn't there and it was hard to find all of traditional Pesach foods I really wanted. I left the supermarkets feeling oddly down, as if my new home couldn't sustain me Jewishly. This city isn't Brooklyn.

Then I talked with my friend, M.B., who kindly reminded me that there's only one Brooklyn and that the vast majority of people who celebrate Passover scrape it all together and just celebrate the holiday, wherever and however. And then he said something that I just only figured out, "The whole holiday is about making it work," or something like that, and he's right, of course. This was a huge gift to me.

Passover is about the celebration of human freedom, the liberation of the spirit, and the beauty of the bountiful that surrounds us. It's a holiday about the redemption of Jews from slavery and, amazingly, it's suffused with the sadness of G-d's reign of terror upon the Jews' masters.

I'm sorry I took for granted the incredible bounty surrounding me, here, in Western Canada. An embarassment, of riches.

One of the final passages of the Haggadah, the book read during Passover, is this: "On this Seder night, when we pray for freedom, we invoke the memory of the beloved Elijah. May his spirit enter our home at this hour, and every home, bringing a message of hope for the future, faith in the goodness of man, and the assurance that freedom will come to all."

Doerr Cries.

I was really struck when my friend, R.C., told me about John Doerr's public, tearful breakdown at the TED conference, where perhaps some of the smartest and most privileged individuals gather each year to talk about the future.

Doerr has an amazing biography, but here it is in a nutshell, taken from a comment on the New York Times: "John Doerr has an undergraduate degree in engineering and a M.B.A. from Harvard. Over the course of his career, he has earned several engineering patents, and has helped to fund, among others, Compaq, Netscape, Symantec, Sun Microsystems, Amazon, and Google."

Anyway, here's what happened, according to the same Times piece: "Much is being made of venture capitalist John Doerr breaking down into tears as he talked about global warming on Thursday during the TED conference in Monterey, Calif. But what may be more disturbing is what he actually said: 'I’m scared. I don’t think we’re going to make it.'" He left the stage, weeping, and then hugged his teenage daughter.

Here is a man who, as a paid optimist focused on building wealth and opportunity and innovation, clearly sees something coming down the pike that is not all that good. I take his cry as not so much a plea, which is how some in the media are spinning it. Rather, I take his cry for what it is—a clear sign of despair about the future, delivered directly to his peers.

4-0.

I turned forty yesterday.

Everyone I know has an opinion about turning 40, which seems to be a critical year in the life of a modern human being. In their responsivness to the issue of turning 40, there seem to be three main groups of people:

1. Those who say "It's just a number."
2. Those who say "You look great for your age."
3. Those who say "It's better than the alternative."

Here's the thing: they're all right. And I'm feeling alright.

My wife treated me to a wonderfully relaxing, enjoyable and thoroughly memorable weekend. No surprise parties, no question-and-answer periods, no pressures. Just the joy of knowing that I was loved and that I'm an extremely fortunate individual. I counted blessings all weekend. Here are forty of the more publishable ones:

1. Being alive.
2. Being known.
3. Being healthy.
4. Being wealthy.
5. Being wise.
6. Being a father.
7. Being a husband.
8. Being self-employed.
9. Being awake.
10. Being Jewish.
11. Being wordly.
12. Being on earth.
13. Being honest.
14. Being trustworthy.
15. Being sane.
16. Being of medium build.
17. Being technical.
18. Being productive.
19. Being in Canada.
20. Being able to read.
21. Being able to write.
22. Being able to think.
23. Being able to create.
24. Being able to own.
25. Being able to fight.
26. Being able to form.
27. Being able to fantasize.
28. Being able to run.
29. Being able to rest.
30. Being able to rat.
31. Being able to spent.
32. Being able to save.
33. Being able to decide.
34. Being able to be wrong.
35. Being able to resist.
36. Being able to recognize.
37. Being able to realize.
38. Being able to blog.
39. Being able to bleed.
40. Being able to ride.
Posted by Andrew at 8:58 PM

Some Times.

Parenthood is often romanticized into something its not; the media has learned to do this to sell its books and magazines and toys and shows and products generally. Most of parenthood is holding down the fort, however; it's babysitting, keeping things in order, ensuring peace among family members, watching that no one gets hurt, allowing oneself to have emotions, carting someone here or there or back, delivering or buying procurements, crafting schedules, planning educational schedules and playdates.

Tonight, I came home from a meeting and got to lie in bed with my daughter as she russeled herself to sleep. For about five eternal minutes, I looked into her eyes, quietly, and saw all of her future, her past, her present and her possibility. I saw in her eyes the love I felt for my parents at her age and the sweet, youthful gaze of assurance and anxiety, twirling around itself in endless emotion. She would turn and then I'd think about her future partner, who I desparately hope will love her as much as I. And then she'd turn again, pulling the covers over her a little, the sweet smell of her hair cascading over to me, and I'd feel honored to be in her presence, like some schoolboy in the throes of singular love. And then I'd watch her eyes close and I felt the universe shorten, the light dim, and my affection flow, sadly, awkwardly and randomly. It was hard to hold on to a singular feeling except I knew that this what people call love. My daughter fell asleep, restlessly at first then with some breathing, then turning away from me and curling into a ball and then calm and utter quiet and I was alone. All by myself, with her. I cry.

And here's the rub: The magazines are right.

When It's Crazy.

As my child gets, ever so slightly, older and wiser (not necessarily for the better), the demands of language become more pronounced. About four or five months ago, she started using the word "crazy" to describe certain things that don't quite make sense or aren't right or are, in general, outside the normal scope of daily affairs. For instance, she might say that "that guy looks crazy" because he's wearing a large red hat. I know she got this from me and a few other select sources, because I would say something similar, probably ironically.

It's the other sources that I wonder about. Television and other communication mechanisms use the words "crazy," "insane," "ridiculous," "loony," "nuts" to describe things that don't make sense and "nut job," "nut ball," "loony tune," "dumby," "dumb-head," "dumb-ass," "stoopid," "crazy ass," "shit head," "shit for brains," "lunatic," "mad hatter," "crackpot," "crazy," "crackhead," or "bonzo" to describe people that don't make sense.

I wonder where all of this stems from. The Surrealists, who were essentially shoved under Magritte's umbrella by popular culture, were highly attuned to questions of mental stability, insanity and its cousin, inanity. For the Surrealists, culture was a kind of submission to our dreams and mental disabilities, our nightmares and fears. I remember reading, many years ago, that Breton believed that our real lives are lived in our dreams; I believed him. It could be said that all good artistry is a recognition of the surreal, or the components of life that are not easily explained and it was really the Surrealists that brought this gift to us.

Going back to our need to call things "crazy," I wonder if the increased use of the word and its synonyms has to do with the super-rationalized, hyper-realistic, and over-informed world we inhabit. Capitalism, in all of its glory, has taken those living in the West for a linear ride of structured living. From Ikea to Microsoft, the object is to partition and contain and enhance and support—not to combine, expand, destroy and deny, which is what crazy people do.

Five Minutes to Midnight (or The Weather).

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Doomsday Clock is now set at Five Minutes to Midnight. These guys, probably the smartest group of affiliated individuals in the world (unless you count the employees at Google), have determined that we're now almost entirely screwed, completely and utterly screwed. Briefly, they lay out three horror stories, which, for some reason, only get very light coverage on the daily news, the Web, and on the tube. They are:

Nuclear: "Terrorists alter the long-accepted nuclear threat paradigm."

Environmental: "The future looks even bleaker, as scientists continue to observe cascading effects on Earth's complex ecosystems."

Emerging Technologies: "The emergence of nanotechnology--manufacturing at the molecular or atomic level--presents similar concerns, especially if coupled with chemical and biological weapons, explosives, or missiles."

The Bulletin site (which is quite a work of art in and of itself) goes into lots of nice detail.

Me, I don't need no smarty-pants professorial types to tell me the world is wacked. I read the weather report. Today's weather says this:

"WINTER STORM WATCH FOR SOUTHWEST MOUNTAINS / LOWER GILA REGION, SIERRA COUNTY LAKES REGION, TULAROSA BASIN / SOUTHERN DESERT, SOUTHERN SACRAMENTO MOUNTAINS, SOUTHWEST DESERT / BOOTHEEL, SOUTHWEST DESERT / MIMBRES BASIN, SOUTHERN DESERT, NM EL PASO COUNTY, HUDSPETH COUNTY, TX UNTIL THU JAN 18 2007 06:30 AM MST"

"COASTAL FLOOD WARNING FOR SOUTHERN BREVARD COUNTY, INDIAN RIVER COUNTY, ST. LUCIE COUNTY, MARTIN COUNTY, COASTAL VOLUSIA COUNTY, NORTHERN BREVARD COUNTY, FL UNTIL THU JAN 18 2007 04:00 PM EST"

A FREEZE WARNING MEANS SUB-FREEZING TEMPERATURES ARE IMMINENT OR HIGHLY LIKELY. THESE CONDITIONS WILL KILL CROPS AND OTHER SENSITIVE VEGETATION.TO PREVENT FREEZING AND POSSIBLE BURSTING OF OUTDOOR WATER PIPES...PIPES SHOULD BE WRAPPED...DRAINED...OR
ALLOWED TO DRIP SLOWLY. THOSE THAT HAVE IN-GROUND SPRINKLER SYSTEMS SHOULD DRAIN THEIR SYSTEMS...OR COVER ANY ABOVE-GROUND PIPES TO PROTECT THEM FROM FREEZING."

Bye Leslie Harpold.

It seems that Leslie Harper, an early web designer and developer, has passed away at the ripe age of 40. I did not know her though I've seen pages of her site.

Playing to Lose.

It's an unwritten rule of parenthood that, when you play games with your kids, you have to lose. It's important for your sense of self-worth and, more importantly, for theirs, to lose. You have to lose because children have to win. They have to know that they can win, even against adults. Kids need to be able assess a situation, wiggle their way out of it, and come out ahead. Mostly, they love to win, even more than adults do.

I've learned the hard way that there are a few games that allow one to lose easily. Generally, this requires what I call "reverse cheating." Reverse cheating means putting cards under your bum when the kid's not looking or stacking cards in such a way that the kid gets the advantage or pretending to roll the die and always getting a "1" or checking off the wrong boxes. Here are a few games that are good for losing:

• Clue Jr.
• Concentration (card game based on remembering and matching cards)
• Checkers
• Candy Land
• Chutes and Ladders

- Brought to you by the letter "C."

Deleting People.

I've spent the past hour or so going through my address book in Microsoft Entourage. I'm preparing to send out my direct mail piece for the year for MANOVERBOARD and need to prepare the addresses for sending. It's a depressing task, to say the very least.

I started with 1536 names in my address book. I'm now down to 908. Some of those were duplicates, others were lower-cased names that somehow got stuck in my address book over the past few years. Others were names I no longer recognize. I found the names of old girlfriends who had phone numbers but no email addresses - this was before the ubiquity of email. I found aunts and uncles and cousins with whom I haven't spoken in many years.

Other entries were art galleries, in New York mostly; these were galleries to which I used to send slides when I was a painter. Ironically, every one of these gallery entries had no addresses attached to them; they're perhaps ten years old.

Sadder still were the friends and family that had passed away. Some were very close, like my grandmother. I can't delete her name and address and phone number from my address list. I just can't. Others had passed and I kept their spouse or partner in the address book. It's just a small way of remembering these people.

It also means that time has passed by, quickly still. These individuals lived and live and now they are just one small part of my attention; some more than others. The time goes and the entries go.

Starting.

I'm a big fan of Seth Godin, who has dropped out of sight (my fault) recently. He had a great post on his blog a few days ago, called When to start. It's simple. Get to it. All that.

This weekend was the Canadian Football League's Grey Cup, held here in Winnipeg. I've been hearing about it for months and I finally twigged on Tuesday that the Grey Cup is as big and dumb and fun as the Superbowl. It's a big deal: $30 million will be brought to Winnipeg just this weekend, parties have been going on constantly since Thursday, major corporate sponsorships, huge hot air balloons flying overhead, traffic. It is.

After looking around for a few months for an onlnie task organizer and notekeeper, I'm trying out Backpack, the mid-weight information manager from 37signals. So far, so okay.

1.6 Billion.

So, Google paid $1.6 billion for You Tube. I'm psyched for the giddy You Tube guys, who, unfortunately, made fools of themselves online.

Not that it's gonna happen, but here's how I'd divvy up the $1.6 billion if I had just sold You Tube:

• $200 million would be divided equally to 200 friends and family members. That comes to $1 million each.
• $100 million would be evenly divided among my 60 employees. That comes out to $1.67 million per staff member.
• $20 million would go to the two universities that were fortunate enough to grant me degrees. The funds would be tagged for the art and literature departments only. That's $10 million each, if I did the math correctly.
• $50 million would go to each of my immediately family members, which amounts to about ten people. Let's see. That's $500 million right there.
• I'd probably give about $100 million dollars to charities. These would include humane societies, hunger and food security organizations, and a few choice political think tanks.
• $20 million would go into my own business and a few crazy ideas I have about helping individuals do better things online. These would include online applications, desktop applications that are missing for Mac, and a new online magazine called "Stanley."
• I'd probably buy a new Saab.
• I might consider investing in real estate in far-out places like Paris, London, and Berlin. The homes and the car would amount to $10 million, which would include extra money for traveling to and from and furnishings and food.
• I'd probably buy some extra life insurance from Lloyd's of London or something.

Let's see, that leaves me about $650 million. What the hell am I going to do with that?

No Water.

Our daughter turned on the tap this morning to wash her hands in the bathroom and there was self-worry that she had done something wrong. She had not. After scuffling around and across the basement for a few minutes, we noticed a truck outside that read "Drinkable Water" and a smaller, but still large, sign that said "Pull Here." There was a pickup truck in front with a man inside reading the newspaper and drinking a coffee from Robin's donuts. I stepped outside to ask what the problem was and he said that there was a huge watermain break down the street and that we could use the potable water that they had brought in.

I was relieved, even tearfully happy. The city had noticed the break and would repair it by this afternoon. A crew had been scheduled for the repair. I was thinking about how this crew works. Do they, like firefighters, sit around the Department of Waste and Water, awaiting the call of duty?

Today was Yom Kippur, a day of atonement, apologizing, remembering, fasting, and the not drinking of water.

Random Bloody Thoughts.

In no particular order, or odor:

These are the Days of Awe. The world is awash in guilt and redemption and I stand at the short precipice of feeling in love and hate with it all.

My friend, MG, once said that "we treat our bodies like machines" and he's right. We push chemicals into our temples and expect positive results, including greater efficiency and better productivity. Most of the time, we're right to do this. The organic and inorganic substances we inhale, digest, inject and observe are goody bags in the cavern of a worldly Halloween.

There seems to be a trend, on television lately, away from reality programming toward comedy and dark adventure. The reasons are probably many: real boredom, aspiration, better kinds of hope taking the form of mass entertainment that, in turn, substitute in for real politic.

I'm in the process of rebranding my company. This means that I'm assigning a new visual identity to way I feel about representing my professional life. It's a bit like taking your old clothes to the Salvation Army, kissing them goodbye, and shopping in the eternity of a store called Maybe. It would be nice if they sold coffee there. But they don't.

My two cats, Gusty and Inky, are getting older. I can see it in the way their fur sits on their bodies. For both of them, the tufts of hair separate just a little bit from the corpus of hair upon them. It's like me.

When I was about ten years old, my grandfather, a physician, bought for me a copy of Gray's Anatomy. I devoured that tome, learning, by the time I was in high school, the name of every single muscle, bone and ligament in the body. I took apart a plasticine cat in AP Biology with a partner. First, we took off the skin, which was the hardest part. Then we teased apart all of the musculature. I loved the little heart. We kept the cat in a bag. I'll never forget the smell of formaldehyde and skin.

The television show, Grey's Anatomy, just featured a song that sounded a lot like one by My Bloody Valentine.

Going Grand.

A friend of mine emailed me a passage from Carl Sagan's last chapter of his book Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium:

Near my shaving mirror, so I see it every morning, is a framed postcard. On the back is a penciled message to a Mr. James Day in Swansea Valley, Wales. It reads:

Dear Friend,

Just a line to show that I am alive & kicking and going grand. It's a treat.

Yours,

WJR

It's signed with the almost-indecipherable initials of one William John Rogers. On the front is a color photo of a sleek, four-funneled steamer captioned "White Star Liner Titanic." The postmark was imprinted the day before the great ship went down, losing more than 1500 lives, including Mr. Rogers'. Annie and I display the postcard for a reason. We know that "going grand" can be the most temporary and illusory state. So it was with us.

They say that most stomach ulcers happen in September.

Zero.

I visited the World Trade Center many times. This is what I, and many others saw.

Not Explosive.

I'm typically not much of a believer in the 9/11 conspriacy theories that are very popular right now. I think something is definitely amiss in the way that the Bush administration investigated the events of that day and that there surely was and will be cover-ups, some very large in scale.

I've seen and read a good deal of 9/11 conspiracy info and much of it is tantalizing. Theorists, even the best and smartest ones, provide tremendously seductive reasons to distrust the government and flame our fears of an administration so clearly out of public visibility and control. The Bush administration, in its high jinx, denials, and outright lies about its intentions and objectives, has started the fires of conspiracy and deserves to be under incredible scrutiny (and even more than it currently holds). There is something right about all of the theories but mostly they make the government out to be more powerful, slippery and omnipotent than it is. In turn, theorists unwittingly turn the public against government as groups question every facet of its social responsbilities. Perhaps this is a simplification, but my concern (and, ultimately, my own conspiracy theory) is that 9/11 conspriacy theorists are aided (and maybe funded) by those who dislike and distrust federal government. The more that government is seen as a failure, and an instigator of failure, the more likely the public will be to dismantle its services, including those for health, welfare, and security.

But tonight I watched MIT Engineer Breaks Down WTC Controlled Demolition
a video on Google that documents what seems to be a pretty serious flaw in the 9/11 story. Jeff King, the speaker and an engineer, notes that the buildings at the WTC pretty much could not have fallen the way they did without explosive assistance. He starts the video with televised reports, which I remember seeing the next day, about explosions downtown that may have helped or caused the fall.

This is the Fall. We're in the Fall. The Fall has begun. It's the Fall. We're Falling. I'm Falling. You also are Falling. We are Falling.

Animated World.

My daughter watches a lot of—perhaps too much—animated television programming. The total hours per day is probably 1 to 2, which isn't a lot. It does add up when you calculate it out in terms of days, weeks, months, and years and you realize that a child's education in large part comes from animated creatures, mostly animals, that speak, feel, act, think, react, cry, laugh and interact constantly. You know the names—Binoo and Barney and Bear and Beaver. You might worry, like many researchers and parents do constantly, that your child is being exposed to a bombardment of commercially acceptable imagery, that a young mind is being transformed by business practices that seek to motivate children to act in ways their shareholders prefer. And many do, as do I.

But there's another side to this, a spiritually significant side to animated televisuals that often gets unmentioned and unnoticed. It's that the animals, persons, and creatures depicted in these animated features are alive—truly and utterly alive. They speak, feel, act, think, react, cry, laugh, and interact constantly. They live in an emotionally sensitive world where things happen (sometimes not nice things) and they must live to work through and around those things. Hives fall from trees and bees chase animals around the forest. A character finds jobs for other characters as part of a class assignment but worries that he's not doing a real job in turn. A cloud falls from the heavens and someone (maybe a chicken) says that the sky is falling.

Moreover, these characters are not just alive. They also live, just like all things do in a child's world. From what I remember as a child, every object is living, every thing has a feeling, every animal can give off feelings. I remember, when I was maybe only 5 or 6 years old, feeling badly when I threw something out—a piece of paper, for instance. A sadness would come over me that that object would no longer live and be part of my daily observations. I never wanted to hurt anyone or anything's feelings; this was a sensitivity of a living child amazed to be in life. I worried about what would happen to that piece of paper and how it would feel that I pushed it out of my world.

Today, when walking home from the supermarket, I asked my daughter which house she liked more, ours or that of our neighbors. She said she liked both. I asked her why and she replied that she didn't want one of the houses to feel bad. I agree with her. Making decisions and opinions is always hard but, when one puts up the light of an animated world against one's daily practices, they become harder.

Phenomenomics.

I'm now reading two books that I've been interested in for some time. Freakonomics, given to me for my birthday a while ago, is quite a good read. And a friend lent me Collapse, which I started and I found to be brilliant and, at least in the intro, disengenuous. Diamond argues again and again that his studies of the collapse of ancient cultures and societies because of poor human interaction with environments do not necessarily correlate to our modern societies and cultures. But then he continues to make the point that his studies probably are applicable. It's like he doesn't want to get too much credit if the sh*t hits the fan and he doesn't want to get too little credit if the sh*t hits the fan but in both cases, he knows he's right.

Anyway, I came up with some alternative names for Freaknomics, which is a good read. The name of the book is accurate because the book, despite its attempt to argue that the authors are studying unusual economic practices, are really just studying practices. There's no real economics in the book. Rather, the authors, who twist a good story around their studies of human behavior, examine the oddities of relationships among people that also happen to have something to do with money. Economics, or "the social science that deals with the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services and with the theory and management of economies or economic systems," doesn't really come into play much in the book.

Without further ado, here are some revisionist titles I thought I'd share:

• Filonomics
• Flubonomics
• Filternomics
• Fanonomics
• Phenomenomics (my favorite)

What the Heat Does.

It's hot. Just about everywhere on the map of North America, there are red zones. Bright red, even.

Californians are being asked to conserve energy, folks in Queens still don't have their electricity back, and all over this area, there's a drought. (In Europe, twenty-two people died in France today because of the heat.)

Here's a list of things that the heat makes us do, unwittingly:

• Talk about the heat, the weather, and global warming, more generally.
• Expose our chest hair or cleavage.
• Wonder about our 80% bodily water content.
• Hope we don't get stuck in an electrical outage during a subway or elevator ride.
• Job search, in air conditioning, for positions that have more than 2 weeks vacation.
• Sweat.

And a Fourth Day.

Thursday: It was slow. The air had stopped moving entirely for the morning. Above the piles of magazines flew, outside, a humming bird, beating its wings and the halting to drink of the sugar water. The sky became the color of cement and the heat pressed down on us. Never repugnant but ever purposeful. Thankfully, there were fans. White fans with names on them like "windmere" and "Regal" that served the purposes of their masters, us. On beautiful occasions, time slowed to the point of stopping and then the sun would come out and odd wind blasts would announce themselves, abruptly. We saw a chipmunk. One of us got a bee sting on her foot; it was not me, but had it been, I would have complained for the next eight hours, laid up in bed and hoping for night to fall. The winds picked up and up and the lake, from a distance, looked like a small sea with white caps and all. The end of the vacation was nigh. In the morning, we pack and drive.

- Live, from Moose Lake, your fearless reporter, Andrew Boardman.

Three Days and a Lake.

Monday: It was cool. Low clouds hung over the green grass and grey water. Slight winds rustled our hair as we walked along the dirt paths, speaking in small tones to each another. There were bugs. But most of them twittered around rather than on and the sun shone barely through a series of constant cloud patterns. The clothesline swayed back and forth and, on our walks, you could hear the rustle of small animals. Birds and maybe rabbits. The sunset was golden and wrapped our three lives in warmth and the momentary awareness of earthly grace. I bathed in the bright, harsh sunset and watched our shadows become, at times, one. We hoped for sun.

Tuesday: It was grand. The sun, which we had hoped for, after all, came out and was strong. The day was spent amidst the wooden dock and its varied paraphanalia: the preservers, the lotions, the drinks, the towels and the chips. The sky was mostly a whitish blue and the greens were grand and gorgeous, everywhere. We looked out at the now bluish lake waters and there minnows in schools went left and right and then left. Larger fish darted in and out of the day and, for the most part, I avoided them. The green algae below felt weird beneath my feet but the smaller stones in the shallows were nice. The conversation was staggered around the good fortune of good weather. We hoped for continuity.

Wednesday: It was warm. The day passed slowly at first as we bathed in the North lakeside. The sands there were hard and stepped on but it was quiet and the trees seemed happy to tolerate our temporary hold on that beach. Slowly, as if half-hour increments, the sun grew hotter and hotter and the air, more still. Our shadows wouldn't hold and the drinks flowed more deliberately. We were thirsty and the sun shone deeply. The clouds took on a white, thin appearance later in the afternoon and the lake became still, except for the occasional ripples caused by motor boats. Afraid of the fish, I did not swim. It was announced that it would probably rain later, perhaps during the late evening; the humidity was soaring and the temperatures along with it. The trees looked thin in the heat and nothing much moved except for the honeybees and their clover harvests.

-Reporting live from Moose Lake, Manitoba, near the Minnesota border, your intrepid reporter, Andrew Boardman.

Beauty and the Beast.

My daughter is busy watching Beauty and the Beast, the 1991 Disney fandangle. I have nothing to say about it because I've been researching online the incredible flooding near where I grew up in Pennsylvania. I just spoke with my parents and they noted that one of my favorite towns, New Hope, is totally under water (or at least up to the doorknobs). I have nothing to say about this because I'm working on a laptop, in which I just re-installed Quicksilver a little application, which, it turns out, is even better than Peter Mauer's little application called Butler, which I have uninstalled. I have nothing to say about this because I'm finishing a nice glass of soda, which they call pop here in Winnipeg. The soda is cold and good. I have nothing to say about it because the music from the movie is distracting me. It's cold and good. Oh.

Shams.

I'm feeling a bit under the weather. But there's a certain pessimistic clarity that comes with feeling crappy. There are quite a few shams out there these days:

1. Yesterday, Steven Hawkings announed in Hong Kong that earth could end pretty soon and that we had all better figure out a way to go to Mars. I'm a bit of a doomsayer myself, but come on. Mr. Hawkings is not only making the dire predictions of the anxious class but his call to arms is weak in both theory and practice. How will we get to Mars when we can't even figure out (e.g. allocate enough resources) how to cure AIDS?
2. Increasingly, I see lots of talk about organic food, organic food, organic food. Even Wal-Mart is saying they're going to get in on the game. I'm a bit of an organic food lover myself, but come on. Do people really believe that processed, industrial organic food is better than processed, industrial regular food? Animals have been eating for about, oh 200 million years or so. I'm thinking that taste will continue to regulate our health.
3. A designer blog recently redesigned: Design Observer. It went from a relatively interesting, relatively well-designed blog about design to a relatively interesting, relatively well-designed blog about design. I'm a bit of designer myself, but come on. It's amazing that the good intentions of a group of designers can produce something so average. Some other designers, on a somewhat better design blog, further discuss the redesign of the design of Design Observer>.
4. I purchased a really nice soup mix today. It contains locally grown lentils and other dried vegetables. The recipe on the packaging calls for adding fresh vegetables to the mix and that, with just plain old water, you get a spanking good soup. I'm a bit of a soup admirer, but come on. The recipe should have called for stock. Well, the soup is bland and I'm taking the heat.

Having said all of that, the universe is expanding gorgeously, the world is spinning magic.

What Kids' Things Are.

Terribly ungrammatical, the above header is meant to merely describe.

As a consumer dad, or a consuming father - whichever comes first - it's hard not to notice the strong similarities between certain kids' products and their adult counterparts. Here's a brief list of some of those products. It's not exhaustive and you can draw your own conclusions:

• Crayola crayons box:Marlboro cigarettes
• Pez candy dispensers::Bic lighters
• Barbie clothes::Gap clothes
• Mentos::Uppers
• M&Ms::Downers
• Fruit Rolls::Fruit Rolls

Census.

Canada is a small country that continues to impress.

Yesterday, we sent in our census questionnaire. It included two documents, one in French and one in English, with a yellow, postage-paid envelope to allow easy return to the government. The questions were very well-written and the design of the document was very straightforward and easy to follow. The questions were non-intrusive (though I understand others receive more thorough sample sets) and you could file your return either on paper or via the Web.

I just went to the website and, notably, the online forms are accessible to those with disabilities. This is impressive, and while not difficult, it means that the government here went the extra yard to ensure the greatest number of people could enter data about themselves, their families and partners.

I also found an interesting history of the census. But, for me, I'm fascinated with the clause at the end of the census document which gives everyone the option to release their completed information to the public in 92 years: "For those who give explicit permission, Statistics Canada will transfer their information to Library and Archives Canada in 2098, which in turn will make it publicly available."

I try to imagine how unimportant my personal information will be in 2098. It's not hard. But I'm also trying to imagine what the world would have inherited in 2098 and what my children's children might look like in that inheritance. Canada, or no Canada, that's hard.

Does G-d Have Rainbow Hair?

During yoga this morning, I became entranced by the sound of the group singing in monotones, each of us individually breaking down whatever blocks we were holding. I've experienced a lot of atonal music, but the connectivity of 10 people holding a tone or series of tones in one room over a period of a few minutes was overwhelming.

I later talked with a tax lawyer here who changed my current way of thinking about my business, its approach and its location. I appreciate speaking with lawyers and other high rationalists (like shrinks and accountants) because of their ability to clear through my own miasma, superstitions, and closely held (and often erroneous) beliefs.

Then I went to purchase a bike for my daughter at Canadian Tire, the Canadian version of K-Mart on good steroids. The staff there, all young and good-looking, were wildly helpful, for reasons that I cannot fathom. One associate came over to measure my daughter and look up all of the bike models and their availability. He then had training wheels installed on the bike for us while we shopped for such things as cat litter and a new overhead light for the car. When we picked up the bike and my daughter started riding it around, a female associate came over and showed my daughter how to negotiate the aisles. At the top of the stroke, my four-year-old faltered. The associate said something which later proved to be true: "None of the little kids learn how to ride here for some reason. They just can't do it. But I'm sure that when they get home, they're fine."

Then, we took our daughter out for an evening ride and, sidewalk-crack by sidewalk-crack, she rode. It took time and confidence and praise and small pushes and a few falls but she did it. She rode. She rode.

A few days ago, we were doing some drawing on the living room table using color markers and copy paper. My daughter wanted to draw a rainbow - she used red, yellow, purple and green. Then she drew a picture of a person beneath the rainbow. She asked "Does G-d Have Rainbow Hair?"

1:02:03 a.m. April 5, 2006.

Last night, I believe I went to sleep at exactly this time.

Popular Religion.

My daughter has, for whatever reason, a lot of toys, videos, games, books, drawing instruments, building blocks, dolls and other familiar commercial kid fare. Lately, I've been trying to figure out what religious denomination each of the main characters are. Here's a preliminary list.

• Barbie. Christian.
• Strawberry Shortcake. Christian.
• Madeline. Christian, likely Catholic.
• Curious George. Christian.
• Arthur. Christian. Possibly agnostic.
• Caillou. Christian.
• Berenstain Bears. Jews converted to Christianity, or Jews for Jesus.
• Clifford. Christian.
• Piggley Winks of Jakers. Irish Catholic.
• Teletubbies. All Christian.
• Buster of Arthur. Christian.
• Francine of Arthur. Jewish.
• Little Bear. Christian. Perhaps Episcopalian.
• Max and Ruby. Both Christian.
• Franklin. Christian.
• Dora the Explorer. Catholic.
• Diego, her cousin. Catholic.
• Pablo, Tyrone, Tasha, Uniqua and Austin, a.k.a. The Backyardigans (perhaps the best written and most interesting visual and musical kids show out there). Christian.
• Maya. Catholic.
• Miguel. Catholic.
• Big Bird. Christian.
• Elmo. Maybe Catholic.
• Winnie the Pooh. Christian.
• Kipper. Christian.
• Polly Pocket. Christian.
• Angelina Ballerina. Christian.
• Thomas the Tank Engine. Episcopalian.
• Oswald. Christian with Jewish friends.
• Sleeping Beauty. Definitively Christian.
• Belle of Beauty and the Beast. Christian.
• Cinderalla. Christian.
• Gorilla, in Goodnight Gorilla. Non-denominational.

These are just guesses.

Headshots.

As a new subscriber to the daily Winnipeg Free Press, after reading the front section and the business sections, I occasionally turn to the obituarites. It's not out of any real morbid fascination, though my analyst might disagree. Rather, I look carefully at the cropped, black and white formal and informal photographs of individuals who grace the pages of small text and commemorative, sad, or celebratory content. Laid out in row after row, the faces are scattered on the pages. Sometimes, a photo of someone from 1937 or 1973 will be seen next to another photo of the same person from 1995. The changes in appearance are inherently shocking; once young, vibrant and polished grinning faces turn into wrinkled and sometimes grimmacing ones. But what's even more shocking is that sense of mild shock. Why should I, or anyone, be amazed by the transition, which is as normative as a tree dropping leaves in the Fall? I know that much has been written about the Seven Up! series but my quick theory is that we're amazed that we are alive to witness not being alive.

I want to write more about this but I can't.

Bookends.

A fine bookstore, Burton Lysecki Books, sits just around the corner from us. It is literally two blocks away. It took me seven months to turn the corner, past the all-day 7-11, and walk into the store. What I found was relatively astounding. Like many Winnipeg institutions, the outside is extremely unprepossessing. Half-finished siding, a hand-lettered sign, dirty windows and sidewalks filled with sand and snow decorate the store's exterior. Once inside, I was faced with thousands upon thousands of books, most of them immediately old, aging, and beautifully produced. Whole shelves were filled with now-ancient encyclopedias published by companies that are no longer extant. Other shelves were stacked neatly with gold-edged, leather-bound, small books, at one time issued in series. At the top of one shelf, I saw the entire works of Emerson. I couldn't reach high enough to pull one of those works down, which seemed apropros. Multiple rooms led to other rooms, some more cramped and claustrophobic and some more open. There were "art" books (with none on "design") as well as a large area dedicated to "science" and other to "ideas." (This is the first time I've seen a used bookstore with a category called "ideas.") Sure, there were stacks devoted to science fiction, Penguin fiction, new paperpack fiction, and erotica. There was even, wonderfully amidst the arcania, a collection of 1980s-vintage Playboys, wrapped together in groups of 4 or 5.

Lysecki Books isn't the only used bookstore in North America. The store, though, is renowned for its superb collections and, from what I understand, well respected among academics and collectors in this city. I used to make a habit of visiting used bookstores years ago in all of the places I've resided and visited: Philadelphia; Providence; Boston; Paris; Washington, DC; Krakow; Warsaw; Berlin; Albany; Troy; Brooklyn and Manhattan. I loved feeling the weight of old hardcovers in my hands and knowing that that book held recoverable knowledge that would soon, perhaps, be secretly mine. I loved knowing that troves of information were being archived by the used booksellers of the world and that these purveyors of the written were also the private guards of our collected knowledge.

Today, I felt the immense weight of two bookends squeezing stores just like the one I visited. One bookend is a collection of companies that go by the names of Amazon.com, Chapters, Barnes & Noble and eBay. The other bookend includes the huge, uber-friendly and coffee scented chain stores like Chapters, Barnes & Noble and local large scale retailers. It took me seven months to visit Lysecki Books because I visit, honor, and take tremendous pleasure in the bookends.

Purim.

We went today to a local synaogogue's Purim celebration for kids. It was incredibly well-organized and thought-out. Volunteers from all segments of the congration, including teenagers and staff and those from the sisterhood and brotherhood were on hand to make balloon animals for kids, paint their faces, help them throw rings around small objects, and watch them jump up and down in one large and one small bouncing air machine thing. Drawing and crafts abounded. The rabbi (I think it was the rabbi because it typically is for some reason) got to have sponges thrown at his face while staring through a Daffy Duck cutout. He took it serenely and with good humor.

I thought that his response to having small (and some not so small) kids throwing sloppy, wet objects at his face was the response that I would like to have to general setbacks. How do you get that? I figure it comes with a bunch of humility mixed in with nerve, self-confidence, a belief in goodness coupled with a sense of complicity with the most honest facets of the world. Mix in a little humor, a love for innocence and an acceptance of self-violation as well as a bit of sheer naivite and you've got a mensch.

Happy Purim.

I Love ...

There are a lot of people I love. They pretty go unmentioned on a blog, and rightly so.

Here are the things I love (I mean I really love) that are not people (in no particular order):

• The ease of death.
• Domain names that end with .ca.
• Slippers in the winter.
• Owning a small business.
• Collapsing discarded food cartons.
• Coloring within the lines.
• Bryant Park.
• The smell of spring.
• Designing with Web standards.
• Animal rights.
• Contemporary Judaism.
• The activity of reading well-kept blogs.
• The quiet of night.
• Margins.
• Documentaries about political success.
• The sky's light.
• Multiple moons.
• Cement highways.
• Slab serif fonts.
• Any magazine.
• Walking straight.
• Smooth skin.
• Blackness.
• Large ships I don't have to get on.

Run.

I just got back from a run/walk with my friend M.M. at the Pan Am Pool, where there is a sweet, albeit paved, track around the building. To many, this would be about as big a news item as eating raisins with one's cereal in the morning. For me, it was pretty momentous. I haven't worked out in any serious, heart-pounding, fat-burning, heat-searing, leg-pushing, arms-moving, lungs-working way probably in about 3, maybe 4, years. The best shape I was ever in was when I prepared for about eight months for hte AIDS Ride, which ended in shame the year after I rode from Boston to New York City in three days.

I can't explain the level of immediate elation I experienced as I left the gym this morning. It was a combination of relief, satisfaction, adrenaline, and bodily warmth that I don't know can be experienced otherwise (excepting an unmentioned activity). I feel great and it's weird to write this. Thank goodness for the Pan Am Pool, for Winnipeg Community Services, and for my friend, M.M.

Copy Paste.

I do a lot of copying and pasting. So does everybody who uses a keyboard. And it's true that perhaps the most valuable class in my 20 years of education was a typing class in 9th grade.

Sometimes I wonder what the world would be like without the ability to hit control-c and control-v on that same keyboard. Could I do anything? Would any work get done? Could any code get written, any emails responded to, any spreadsheets built, any ideas revised, any reports written, any Photoshop images get made? I don't think so. My new theory is that these two keystrokes, and these two keystrokes alone, are the keys to our global efficiency.

Feats.

On Friday I received my healthcard from Manitoba Health. I carried my new, stamped Canadian Permanent Resident Visa to the offices, took a number (96) and sat for about 10 minutes. The ladies behind the desk called 86 and there was no answer. Then she called 87 and no answer. 88 was the same. 89 the same. Then customer number 90 went up as did 91 and 92 and 93. She called 94 and there was no one waiting. 95 was called and a large man went up to the desks. She called 96, and I saw down, showed her my visa, gave her my address, told her that this was my first time applying for Medicare and she typed my information into the system. About 2 minutes later, after copying my passport, she handed me back a completed, ready-to-use healthcard. I am now completely insured under the Canadian health system. I'm a bit incredulous; being part of a universal government program that is both desirable and acceptable is a strange thing. For most of my life, being part of any government-sponsored system was cause for concern or anxiety.

Covered for free. How strange.

Xmas Spirit

The cards keep coming. The other day we got a beautiful CD compilation of Xmas music hand-picked by a friend of ours from Toronto. It was nicely packaged what with a photo of their daughter on the front and a custom-made wrap on the CD itself. Professionally printed Xmas cards pile up from vendors, clients, and friends. Friends' children bring hand-made and elaborate Xmas cards to our daughter. Everywhere I look I see wreaths and jewels and red and green lights. Kids television programming is non-stop Xmas. Any time we visit friends, mounds and mounds of chocolate, cookies, cakes and other sweets are piled around along with nuts, fruit, cheese, and breads. Xmas music fills the ears at the mall. Good cheer. And websites everywhere have re-decorated to accommodate the appropriate seasonal color scheme. Even money itself looks green and red these days. It all adds up to incredible anxiety on my part. Are we doing enough? Do we have enough chocolate on hand for our visiting neighbors? Did I buy enough gifts for everyone? Who did we leave out? What about me? What if they find out we're Jewish? What then? Is New Year's part of Xmas? Will I seem too Jewish if I work during my vacation time? Are my cats Christian? One came from Poland so I suppose so. The other is from upstate New York. He's Christian, right? What color really represents Chanukah, anyway? Hey, and how do you really spell that holiday? And why do Jews have to have gold-foiled chocolate gelt (money) to give to their kids. It comes in little bags. Could there be anything more shameful and fun and sterotypical? Why does it have to be money? Do we have enough candles for the menorahs? What about wrapping paper? There's never enough wrapping paper. We ran out of tape for the gifts. And we didn't send out cards. Does that make us look irresponsible? Who should I call about the loud Xmas music emanating from a car nearby? Is that a dog? A dog with a Xmas wreath around its neck? What if I'm sick during New Year's? Will that ruin the holiday for me and everyone? Hey, look, another dog!

Einstein's Love

I can't help it. When I read a thing of beauty, I need to call it out. This is the second post about Einstein and I hope it won't be the last. Here is Einstein in 1931, a full eight years before the German invasion of Poland and then all of Europe. It's from a piece called The World As I See It:

The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. It was the experience of mystery — even if mixed with fear — that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms — it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man. I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves. An individual who should survive his physical death is also beyond my comprehension, nor do I wish it otherwise; such notions are for the fears or absurd egoism of feeble souls. Enough for me the mystery of the eternity of life, and the inkling of the marvelous structure of reality, together with the single-hearted endeavour to comprehend a portion, be it never so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature.

Einstein's Irish

I'm listening to an incredible program from Speaking of Faith entitled Einstein's Ethics. The author and physicist James Gates Jr. is speaking about Einstein's very early take on the utter subjugation of blacks in America. As long ago as 1946, he was writing about and speaking about the brilliance of the Americans and their concommitant hypocristy regarding race in America. It's almost enough to make one cry.

Here is a quote from his piece called The Negro Question,:

In the United States everyone feels assured of his worth as an individual. No one humbles himself before another person or class. Even the great difference in wealth, the superior power of a few, cannot undermine this healthy self-confidence and natural respect for the dignity of one's fellow-man.

There is, however, a somber point in the social outlook of Americans. Their sense of equality and human dignity is mainly limited to men of white skins. Even among these there are prejudices of which I as a Jew am clearly conscious; but they are unimportant in comparison with the attitude of the "Whites" toward their fellow-citizens of darker complexion, particularly toward Negroes. The more I feel an American, the more this situation pains me. I can escape the feeling of complicity in it only by speaking out.

Today, while reading a book about Ireland, I told my daughter that she is part Irish because her mother is half Irish. She asked me if I was Irish, too. I said that I was not. She then said, "You should get Irish."

Jew.

I'm a bad Jew. When living in Brooklyn, I was a member of a congregation, doing volunteer work, enrolling my daughter in school there, and attending shul whenver possible. I would have the honor of treating my parents to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur tickets and I could successfully say hello the Rabbi there without feeling shy and somehow ashamed. I had and have had many ambivalent feelings about synagogues in general; typically, they require you to put your head down and push forward and one has to ignore whatever class and economical factors there might exist at the congregation. Too often, I kind of had to seek out those who were like me, or felt like me, in their commitment to religion and observance and I think I almost found that in Brooklyn a few years ago.

I've found that Rabbis and staff at synagogues to be invariably committed to the facility and collection of often difficult congregants that congregate there. I also found that a synagogue is typically run by a few very, very tireless individuals who want to make sure that the place can be the very best it can be; these are the ones who organize events, initiate fundraising, request speakers, and help educate children. It's an amazingly huge set of responsibilities to be a full member of a congregation and it's one that I hope I'll have a chance to have again.

But since moving here, I've found it difficult to find just the right place (or know of the right place) to "belong." It's a matter of speaking with people, visiting congregations, and, ultimately, taking a risk. No one shul is perfect but there must be a place here where I can call home. We haven't had the sheer time to do the research but I do hope there will be time soon.

But I've also felt like a bad Jew because I haven't been doing the many things that I associate very strongly with Judaism and Jewishness - volunteering in the community, donating one's earnings, praying and singing and dovening, and, mostly, reading. I've gone Jew LCD: Jewish Lowest Common Denominator.

It's particularly difficult right now (spiritually or psychologically) because Christmas is almost upon us in full swing. And while, in New York City, one's religion or religiosity could kind of get lost in the shuffle (for good and for bad), here it's more apparent. One of the parents at Maeve's school said today, "Don't forget to get your Christmas money to me for our present." I didn't know what she meant and she explained that she was collecting funds to give to World Vision to give a gift of two goats or a dozen hens to an African or Asian family to give to the teacher. All of the commercial streets in our area have Christmas wreaths and, one by one, the lights are going up on each of the houses around here. We're not the only Jewish family in the area. But it doesn't make it any more odd to feel like a self-imposed minority in a new city that, truthfully, seems about as open to minorities as I could imagine.

Double Thanks

Some new friends in Winnipeg invited us over for an American Thanksgiving this evening. It was very informal and very delightful. Like us, he is American and she is Canadian. Like us, they have a small child and feel blessed to have a warm, small house in a small city. And like us, they are kind of economic refugees (my new term of phrase, coined via my wife) from the U.S. Both academics, they found it difficult to raise a kid in San Diego and get the most of their lives with their salaries and their livelihoods.

Anyway, I had two Thanksgivings this year and so, here are the things I'm doubly thankful for (in no particular order):

• Orange Juice
• Dark Blue
• Sincere Simplicity
• Sheer Strength
• Bad Television
• Good Movies
• Fine Chocolate
• Small Books
• Warm Homes
• Great Friends
• Family Commotion
• Tough Tears
• Canadian Music
• Two Felines
• Adobe Photoshop
• Utter Silliness
• Wood Fires
• Smelly Poopy
• Large Paintings
• 2000 Saabs
• Usable Websites
• Handwritten Letters
• New York
• Apple Computer
• Tyra Banks
• Savings Accounts
• Independent Entrepreneurship
• Cold Coke
• Smooth Stones
• Sweet Words

Cleaning

A few weeks ago, I mentioned Jason Kottke's recent post about tidying up. Sometimes, and it is a rare occasion, an idea stick in the craw of one's brain and doesn't let go. In Jason's post, he noted that cleaning up is an activity that is also well represented by numerous other, more metaphorical, activities such as modern sports.

But as I've been doing a lot of interface design the past week, I've been thinking about how designing is itself a physical process that echoes if not mimics cleaning up. When working on a website interface, I'll typically add, piece by piece, more and more elements until everything is starting to look like chaos hit the fan. I'll place photographs, pop-in a few gradients, push a few lines here and there, import some Illustrator elements, pull in a few color swatches and add more text than is really needed.

Then I pare down, little by little, pixel by pixel until there's only what I feel is needed. I'll try to kill everything that is superfluous. There's even a little tool I love in Photoshop called "Delete Hidden Layers" which, in one fell swoop, takes out all of those little layers of photos, gradients, lines, swatches and text that are not being used. It's a very physical process of cleaning and the end result is that (after a few hours of cleaning) I gain (or my client does) a successful design. I know this is not news, and many others have better stated it.

What interests me about the subject now is that cleaning appears to be an inherently radical phenomenon. Cleaning is about saving what you want and destroying the rest. Its relationship to racist heterodoxy and to environmental degradation and to all things morally repugnant are clear. We know that, en masse, by cleaning our hands too often with anti-bacterial soap, we are giving the germs out there a fighting chance to replicate and fight against us with better offenses. We know that the worst crimes in the past 100 years have been carried out in the name of keeping continents, countries, and cities free from a specified group of individuals. And we know that providing a monocrop in the growing fields can have large effects on food security, health, and local environments. Cleaning is a conservative value that adheres to no political ideology - yet it does lend itself to experimentation and, occasionally, criminality.

What I'm wondering about is whether design, if it is a form of cleaning and tidying up, which I think it is, is also a very real mechanism to take the nasty, organic, grotesque and fluid of the world and concretize it - to make it digestible and fine and even final.

Remembrance

I've never been a big fan of Veterans Day in the U.S. and that's the clear "fault" of the realities of growing up directly after the fall of Vietnam and the crisis of Watergate. I sometimes thought that the war heros we typically celebrate or mourn in the United States were over-hyped and that the holiday itself was pure patriotism wrapped in fealty to the high offices of the land. I also thought that veterans themselves cared little about the working middle class and that, because "war" was an admission of the poverty of our imaginations, "veterans" were little more than serfs in the battle of those poor fantasies.

It's hard to admit this today but it's true. And kind of sad. After graduate school and an immersion in Jewish cultural history pre-1939, I became much more attuned to the world's political realities and studied in Eastern Europe. It was there that I began to be able to give thanks to those who decided or had decided for them to fight against those in command of the European continent. I became tearfully impressed with those who sacrificed their very existence for the possibility (and it was just a possibility) that peace could break out in Europe and wrongs would be exposed. When I returned to the States in the late 1990s, I noted that Veterans Day was such a small holiday for most Americans.

In any case, here I am in Canada. And, while the US is embroiled in a major war in Iraq and other parts of the world, there seems to be so little media attention (at last online) being paid to those solidiers who died or are going to die. And, oddly, in Canada, the newspapers all week have pushed story after story about Canadians who died or who fought in wars during the past 100 years. Today's newspaper here is full of information about how to celebrate Remembrance Day in town and there's a huge pull-out section about the warzone's lost and the living. Almost everyone is wearing these cloth red poppies on their coats in honor of this day. I've never seen such an outpouring of interest in remembrance of wars past and present.

Culling

In the natural world, nature culls itself. Fires spread through thick forests so that old trees can lie and new tries can grow anew. Bacteria, the oldest living thing in the world, perish in high heat, including the kind of heat generated by human fevers. And snakes feed on birds which feed on worms which feed on earthly organisms which feed on us and others.

It's all so obvious, but somehow, in the recent last 100 years of human history, we've forgotten that mother nature is inescapably persuasive in making sure equilibrium is maintained. The earth's living organisms have survived despite numerous extinctions and disasters. Evolution, despite the current hysteria about it in the States, is a cruel and stringent process; living things pass on when living things live on. It's odd that we've forgotten this despite our aggregate longevity, we all assume we'll live to the average age of 76 in the West. But nature or "nature" is so supremely larger and smarter than us.

Though nature is no closer to us than it was previously, it feels near and getting nearer. Avian bird flu is now in Europe and could easily reach North America in a matter of weeks. A pandemic is not without possibility and, when it reaches probability, the human and economic devestation will have to be immense. Earthquakes and floods have taken thousands of lives just in the past few months. It's all of biblical proportions because, I think, we've forgotten that the Bible is rooted in the fear of G-d and the natural world. The writers and notetakers of the Torah were young scholars. They perhaps didn't even have beards and surely they didn't have very grey hair. But they did have a real sense that the world is unjustly beautiful and compels us to understand the probability of our near mortality.

A Little Mishnah

Therefore was a single human being created: to teach you that to destroy a single human soul is equivalent to destroying an entire world; and that to sustain a single human soul is equivalent to sustaining an entire world. And a single human being was created to keep peace among human beings, that no one might say to another: My lineage is greater than yours!

Happy New Year to my Jewish Friends.

The Scary and the Good

I just re-read the inimitable Hendrik Hertzberg in this week's New Yorker. His piece is titled "Rain and Fire" and he writes about an unusual movie screening of the short film "Last Best Chance" held recently by some of the most far-sighted individuals in the public and commercial life. I've often written and thought about nuclear terrorism (pretty much since I was 13) and I'm nauseously captivated by the catastrophic and hellish scenario that could unfold within our lifetimes if we care not to care. The movie, "Last Best Chance," can be ordered free on DVD from the good folks at the Nuclear Threat Initiative and NTI puts full blame for the scenario at the feet of the war-torn and internally-focused Bush administration. The NTI board of directors is a who's who of serious minds that know it will only take one nuclear bomb aboard a shipping container to really change the world. When I have cash, I'm donating to NTI.

On the other side of the coin, Canada today swore in its symbolic Governor General today. Yes, she acts as Queen Elizabeth II's official representative to the country. And yes, she has roles in the military though she has no formal military experience. But here's the rub: "Michaelle Jean is the first black person and only the third woman to hold the largely ceremonial post as head of state, designed to defend Canada's sovereignty and promote its national identity."

On the edges of this coin, I walked by the Winnipeg School Division's mission statement which seemed newly posted in the hallways of the school here. It struck as extremely well-written and high-minded and I enjoyed reading it as much as I did Mr. Hertzberg's article: "The mission of the Winnipeg School Division is to provide a learning environment that promotes and fosters the growth of each student's potential and provides an opportunity for the individual student to develop the knowledge, skills, and values necessary for meaningful participation in a global and pluralistic society."

Minne

Made it out of Dallas. Actually, it was no big deal. Thought traffic was going to slow me down to the airport. It didn't. Northwest Airlines, even though it's in bankruptcy, got me to Minneapolis.

I'm in Minneapolis. Boring. Pretty. Lots of roundish faces and the bookstore in the airport was good. The landscaped streets in and around these Twin Cities, as seen from the air, was gorgeous.

Waiting for Flight 499. Not a good number, imho. Should be in Winnipeg by 11:30 p.m. Hopefully won't have immigration problems. Hopefully won't have 90 degree front landing gear problems. Hopefully won't have to eat cheese and crackers for dinner for a while. Hopefully won't complain again while 2.5 million people are traversing north, sleeping in cars, handling crying babies with no water or milk, worried about their homes in Houston or south.

Watching CNN at the airport while a disaster unfolds is torture. Literally. Underpaid male and female anchors in Galveston, Beaumont, New Orleans, Lake Charles (future home of the "eye") are trying to come up with stories about Hurricane Rita even though there are no stories, yet. They're trying to come up with those stories as the wind is pushing them around. 65 mile per hour winds almost threw an anchor down.

Read in the Times today (purchased for one American dollar) that you should write your social security number on your arm in case you die belly up in the storm and they don't know who the hell you are. Thinking about all of the people in northern Texas and Oklahoma who will still need to get home after Rita says hello to Minneapolis.

Thankful that there is CNN in this lonely airport at 9:30 p.m. Thankful that I didn't buy Seymour Hersh's paperback XYZ for $14.95. Thankful that no one around me has guns, probably. Thankful that I'm full.

===================

In flight now. The world below is lit darkly in areas light-lined streets show the outlines of the Twin Cities below. I'm amazed at the quick height from which I write. The ground swept away from my eyes so quickly, the cars and trucks stream gently below, and all I can feel is myself, high. The world is a beautiful organizational mystery. I devour it. I'm not ready to die.

In Texas

I'm here in Dallas, Texas, reporting from a place called Paradise. Paradise, in case you don't know, is in Northern Texas and it's beautiful.

Ms. Rita is coming north from Houston very quickly and I must say, it's a bit overwhelming to know that I'm in the eye of the storm. A million and a half people are evacuating Houston to be in Dallas and all the news shows are people buying cartons of water and food at Wal-Mart to stock up. The roads are packed (both ways now) from Houston to here and the traffic is completely snarled in and around Dallas and Fort Worth. Fuel is probably going to run low and, while it looks like the state has everything more or less under control and people here are not scared at all, you can tell that other their breath a lot of worry is going on.

I should be able to make it out of the airport tomorrow but it's hard to know. Rita is moving fast and I'm looking forward to moving faster.

All New Orleans

It's been a very sad day for a city in the deep ol' South. Condolensces and sympathies to all affected there.

The Move

It's going to be a few days, folks, until something more real gets posted. But here's the latest boring move information:

• I sent out a Telegraph the other day that will hopefully reassure clients that MANOVERBOARD will only be a few hundred miles north of the border and a phone call away. Thanks to all of the kind emails I've received.
• I sold the car at a place in Jersey. It was demeaning, gross, and highly demoralizing. I took a minor loss on the vehicle, which I bought used and it was as beautiful as sunshine, shiny and bright, quick and sharp, fast and smooth, and I don't want to discuss it further.
• The boxes are piling up. It's at that point where I honestly cannot determine where all of the objects inhabiting those boxes were placed throughout the apartment. I know we had a good deal of closet space, but how could those closets possibly hold all of these boxes of things? Maybe the question should be phrased with a "Why are" at the start.
• The little one has been positively responsible, responsive, easy-going, unphased and devout the entire time of this naya mishagas. It's impressive. I'm not impressed with myself.
• I've backed up my computer data on four separate systems, just to make sure. Is that paranoia or good personal computing?
• If I didn't get a chance to say goodbye to you, I apologize.
• I swear I'm going to write a book about this move to Canada. Amazingly, the information online about moving there from the States is poor and often inaccurate. The best informational sites are those by the Canadian Government. This is true.
• I'm now using Google's Gmail to receive and respond and write emails. It's a bit of drag, even though it's a pretty sweet online app. I'm pretty old school about these things and strongly prefer a desktop app like Entourage to an online app. Perhaps it's a control thing. NO, it's a control thing.
• The cats are vaccinated as am I.
• My stomach is in small knots the size of thumbs.

I promise to be a better behaving weblog diarist when I settle into my new surroundings. Either that or I promise to be a better person. Maybe I can even pull both off if I try.

Packing It Up, Getting It Out

I've been so extremely busy packing up our home for the movers to come in a few weeks time.

Got rid of books I didn't need. See previous post. Got rid of some paintings. See heartache. Got rid of a bunch of files and folders that haven't seen the light of day in over 10 years. See recycling containers burst.

Getting rid of a old software, old hardware, lots of kids clothes, and a mirror or two that probably won't make the 1,500 mile trip. Got boxes from around the neighborhood, much thanks to Fresh Direct who make the perfect size small moving box.

Getting cold feet. Getting to say goodbye to some friends and family. Getting out a bit more only to know that I'll be getting out less soon. Getting a lot of telemarketing calls lately. Don't know why. Getting up early, getting to bed late, not getting enough work done, getting nostalgia for Coney Island, Gothamist, Prospect Park, a few museums and galleries, Time Warner Cable, the MTA (here's a cool related link from Kottke), the Major Deegan, the Coastal Evacuation signs, getting lost in thoughts, getting gone.

Getting better and getting sad.

Up

It's been too long since I've written a Deckchairs entry because the following things have occurred:

• My daughter is now toilet trained. It's a big deal in the field of parenting and it took a lot of cajoling, bribery, shenanigans, and generalized anxiety. But she is and her parents are relieved that, when she goes to a new school in the Fall, the teachers won't have to do any training around the potty. I must say that I already miss the days of holding her hand while she went to the bathroom in her diaper and watched her as she gave permission to herself to do what she needed to do.
• On the moving scene, I've confirmed with the mover that we're moving. I'm about to detail and sell the car and I'm thinking about loading Tiger so that I can simultaneously worry about something other than moving and shipping and packing and saying goodbye to all that. Up to Canada.
• I experienced a Father's Day that was filled with much joy. In particular, we went to the Brooklyn Museum of Art and I fell in love with Brooklyn generally again. The Museum, having recently undergone reconstruction (remont in Polish, which always made more sense to me), installed an incredible fountain that is beautifully choreographed in the most minimal and yet most pleasurable ways. It's hard to describe but imagine about 20 propelled water streams forced to different levels above a marble base, each one in some sort of synchronicity with the others, falling up, falling down, and then falling flat. The sounds of the water hitting the stone and the droplets hitting each other was mesmerizing and it has completely transformed that busy corner of Brooklyn's Prospect Heights.
• I'm equally mesmerized with the recent fate of public radio and television. It's as if the Republican administrators of our fair country have decided that the small amounts of funding provided to keep public-oriented programming on the public airwaves is too much to bear for our debt-ridden nation. It's hard to believe but their position seems to be that the federal deficit can be helped along by cutting out a few culturally rich parts of the popular arena so that the gap can be filled by benefactors. Bill Moyers has been predicting this for some time and so have I.
• At the same time, I'm impressed by the audacity of Con Rice going around to Arab countries lately pronouncing the importance of democratic institutions and civic values. I always think that the person the person that doth protest too much is always the most guilty of crimes.

More tidbits and better posts coming up.

Posted by Andrew at 10:04 PM

(von) Kloberg Dies

The New York Times today noted the passing of Edward von Kloberg III. The headline is "Edward von Kloberg III, Lobbyist for Many Dictators, Dies at 63." (The "von" was his tasteless add-on.)

Kloberg worked in Washington for some of the most evil persons to walk the face of the planet, including "Saddam Hussein, Nicolae Ceaucescu of Romania, Samuel K. Doe of Liberia and Mobuto Sese Seko of the former Zaire." He tried to recruit North Korea's Kim Jong Il, another beauty of a man. While my back immediately went up, upon reading Kloberg's obit, I also realized that it's too easy to make the distinction between a man like Kloberg and someone like, say, the current President. While Kloberg willingly sought out to represent the most heinous individuals, those who had the discipline and power to decimate and maim populations, some of our own elected officials hold hands with despots and tell us to value freedom and democracy.

To take this line of reasoning further: Kloberg is, in many, many, ways, the more honest of the two. His shingle clearly says: "Hire me if you are a tyrant and I will represent you." Our President's shingle says otherwise: "Visit me if you are a tyrant and I will represent you to my people." Granted, the President lives in a more complex political environment; he needs to pay for many people's dinners, not just his own.

I wonder if the guilt was too much: Kloberg had "leapt from the parapet of a castle" to his final death.

Smoke Signals

I question whether I should even post something on the subject, but it does strike me as slightly odd that Catholic officials chose Joseph Ratzinger to be Pope. The man does seem singularly acceptable to the old church but I can't imagine that it's going to help the foundation of the faith expand in places like Latin America and Africa, where there actually are church-goers (as compared to say, much of Germany, where Mr. Ratzinger hails).

Further, while Jewish newspapers like Haaretz seem to support the choice, his membership in Hitler Youth feels strange. According to a number of articles, Mr. Ratzinger has a very positive view of and has committed himself to contemporary Jews, Judaism, and Jewish religiosity. And it's true that almost any young boy during Hitler's reign was inducted into the youth movement.

Still, still, why did the Church take on a German cardinal when Germany is no longer a model Catholic country? And while hiring a senior citizen as Pope keeps the tenure short, why not make a statement about the Church's longevity with someone with longevity? And what's with the name Benedict? Odd, odd, odder still.

Matcho Peacho

There is a man in the forest who lives all by himself, in the West, and nobody ever built him a home. He has long, scratchy fingernails and is near the trees. His name is Matcho Peacho. Soon a man made his house and he's fine now.

This comes from the brain of a three-year old girl. I find the story dangerously funny.

Tomorrow or the next day, I will post something of another nature -- what websites hide.

Nice or Mad?

During particularly hasteful mornings, my daughter has taken to ask me whether I'm "Nice or Mad." It helps her sort out whether or not to be anxious, angry, or aggressive or something else entirely. I've never before thought about this unique justaposition but it, in fact, jibes nicely with other psychological differentiations that I've been fond of in the past. These include:

• Creep or Asshole: A former professor of mine at the University at Albany remarked once that all people could be easily categorized into the former or latter. I'm the former.
• Dumb or Stupid: I recall being in high school and people called each other one or the other. I'm dumb.
• Sorry or Sordid: I made this one up. I'm sorry.

The Conversation

Tonight I walked home with my friend and we talked and talked, for over 1/2 hour, about all of the things happening in our small world. We talked about the car being towed away this morning after it wouldn't start. She asked me if I was sad to see it go away, and I replied that I was but that it would probably be fixed soon. She told me that she herself was sad to see it go. Then we talked about what it would be like to move away and how our friends in other places are unviewable from any distance except that of being front of them or very near. We spoke about how we would no longer be here if we were there and how much our friends would be different. And then we on to discuss the trash. I told her that I had to take out the garbage tonight, because it hadn't been done in a few weeks. I asked if you could ever imagine what would happen if the trash just piled up and she remarked that we would be all be then sleeping on the garbage at some point and it would be pretty stinky. My daughter then asked when Mommy was coming home and it was a while until she did come home.

It's Sunday

Today is Sunday and these are the scattered, boring thoughts going through the head of a generally unscattered individual. Sundays are somehow always filled with these kind of thoughts for me.

• I must finish that educational website as soon as possible. It's going to be very stylish and I just need time to get the many images properly composed, edited, placed, and styled. I need time. Why the hell am I wasting time writing this?
• New Year's is coming up and I actually don't care. Or do I care? No, I don't care.
• Our closet is packed with cardboard boxes on top of cardboard boxes, and behind them is a vacuum cleaner that needs to be found so that cleaning can be done.
• Tomorrow is Monday and I imagine now that my productivity then won't be great.
• I just received one of the new series of books that holds all of the early Peanuts comic strips. It should make me feel young or old.
• We're going to eat latkes tonight with our family and that will be nice and greasy.

Chanukah

We're now almost half way through the holiday here in Jewishland, which sometimes feels about as remote as the Arctic Circle. In any case, I found a few interesting tidbits about the holiday -- some of which are courtesy of my child's school:

• A Talmudic debate occurred at one point between the schools of Hillel and Shammai. The latter believed that we should light all eight candles and then each day, light one less. Hillel argued for the opposite: light one candle, then two the next night and so on. He won the debate. Chanukah would be a much darker and more deliberate holiday had Shammai won.
• Antiochus Epiphanes was the Hellenic ruler of Syria when the family Maccabee struggled against Greek culture and religion. While today we often glorify the ancient Greeks and their beautiful-looking language and ruins, the nation was once a colony that preyed on its residents like any other hegemon.
• According to Chabad.org, the first time that elephants were used in war was during the Maccabean War.
• My pals at TheGolem.com show Harrison Ford at a Chanukah celebration in New Haven, CT. Who knew? (It's a spoof.)

Not Horrible

Saturday Night Live is now a terribly turgid show and I barely can stay awake through the supposedly "juicy" first half hour of the thing anymore. The SNL website
is crappy and, while Tina Fey is still beautiful, she's no longer funny.

U2 was on last night and they gave a near-lip-synched rendition of the lead song off of their upcoming How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb.

The only thing that caught my closing eye was during the Robert Smigel cartoon of George Bush demonstrating to an audience of the faithful how to convert gays into straights. The cartoon was not funny nor interesting. But there was a sign hanging up in the back of the cartooned Christian right audience that read "Everything is NOT Horrible." I felt immediately that this captures much of the likely feeling of the red states. For many in the United States, everything is fine if not good if not very fine if not very good and the sheer worry of liberals was disheartening to them during this campaign. I understand this to a certain extent. Moral clarity can be filled with personal grace, no doubt, but I do wonder aloud about the possibility of a more national redemption when governed by those who prefer being "cheery."

BM

I went to a relative's bar mitzvah today and found myself mildly fascinated by the totality of the event. While I did not stay for the reception/dinner, I was at the service, held at a Jewish Community Center in New Jersey.

What was found?

• Being around adults and a small kid all the time, thirteen-year old boys and girls look, to me, a bit like weird eight-year olds. They all have that funny, estranged look of angst and cynicism on their faces but their bodies themselves are essentially twigs with sticks coming out where their extremities shoud be.
• For some reason, the boys all sat in the same row and the girls all sat in another row. There seemed to be little if any contact between the two rows. When I was thirteen, we did this, too. Little did I know that at this age, I probably would have had more luck with the ladies than three short years later when I actually wanted "luck."
• The bar mitzvah boy did a stellar job of reading from the Torah. However, back in the day, I had to read about three or four times that amount of text. I don't know if this is a measure of current attention spans, the time of day (5:30 p.m.), or a new custom – but he got off easy.
• I was impressed that the Hebrew school he had attended required all students there to work with a community organization as part of their learning process. He chose to work with a group that helps physically challenged kids play sports and will continue to work with them throughout this year.
• The bar mitzvah itself was a kind of non-event. And yet, in America, it does truly mark one's mild transition to adulthood and adult responsibility. I found it odd that a one-hour service could have the stature of major transformation. And then I remembered that marriage, childbirth, and going to a funeral can all take place within a matter of one solitary hour.

Identity in Brooklyn

On Saturday, our block had its first-ever block party. For many reason, including just plain old forgetfulness, it was scheduled on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year for Jews.

We stepped out in the morning to people preparing for the day of games, rides, food, and fun. Most of the block consists of old-time Park Slopers -- real Park Slopers, perhaps, people who have lived here for a few generations with their families on the same few blocks of houses, lined with trees and cars. People on this block are predominantly white, middle class, Irish Catholic, and they are amazingly insular. For the majority of my eight years on this block, only a few of neighbors have said more than a word to me, though I've tried. Other blocks, I might note, are very different and more diverse.

Anyway, what was interesting about the block party on Saturday/Yom Kippur was our coming home. It was around 6:00 pm, and all of the families on the street (and there were many) were sitting among folding tables, eating BBQ and drinking and carousing. At first, it felt like we lived in another part of the world, perhaps Pittsburgh, but then as we moved down the street toward the apartment, feeling increasingly alone and unwelcome, it felt like New York, perhaps not at its finest. The few Jews on the block were not there and the two newly transplanted Southeast Asian families were nowhere to be seen.

It was not exclusion, nor indifference that I felt. Nor did I feel persecuted, disenfranchised, or scorned.

Rather, I felt like this was why I had moved to New York, to be part of the great mass of anonymity, to be a part of everything and yet have no one know you enough to acknowledge, credit or blame you for anything (unless you're famous). I couldn't blame anyone, including myself, for those feelings. I'm assuming my neighbors see me as an interloper, a temporary resident, a non-Catholic, a minimal participant in the life of the neighborhood, a recipient of the general safety and benefits of the area. And they are right.

The God Gene

I listened eagerly to author Dean Hamer today on the radio, who argued that religiosity and faithfulness are directly inherited in our DNA. Mr. Hamer's new book, The God Gene : How Faith is Hardwired into our Genes, sounds absolutely fascinating, even though Publisher's Weekly and others have panned him, in part because he is the scientist behind the "gay gene."

Mr. Hamer is going out on an evolutionary limb with this hypothesis that, buried deep within our system, is a genetic code that, to varying degrees, provides transmissable expressions, feelings, and assumptions about spirituality, the afterlife, and our place in the world. Mr. Hamer, perhaps most provocatively, makes the case that this can be scientifically proven. I want to believe him that my own faith in some kind of godhead inheres within my physical being and is not a pure result of cultural modifcation and socialization. I'd like to believe, too, that all animals have some correlary to this gene, that their connectedness to us and us to them is physically enabled. And I'd like to believe that my own, particularly Jewish, faith is connected to 4000+ years of historical inheritance.

Of course, I haven't read this yet. But for the longest time, I've felt that the interconnectedness of the world could be both physically and spiritually based, that circumstance and superstition are a subset of reality, and that ecstatic love and passionate prayer are intimated in our primordial and unconscious lives. Pushing this further, I wonder if ultimately these are the same things, the physical and the intangible, for which we've created artificial divides, much thanks to the Ancients.

This is from the inside flap of the book: "Popular science at its best, The God Gene is an in-depth, fully accessible inquiry into the cutting-edge research that is changing the way we think about ourselves, our world, and our culture. Written with balance and integrity, without seeking to confirm or deny the existence of God, The God Gene brilliantly illuminates the mechanism by which belief itself is biologically fostered.

Surfin'

For those of us, like me, who continue to thinking that surfing is what one does when clicking from random webpage to random webpage, this video of a
surfer on a 75 foot swell may change such thoughts. (And yes, apparently, the vid is real. Thanks to J. Kottke.)

More on Black

Last night marked the first night of the Jewish New Year, a typically happy occasion. But it was sadly marked by the death of our small black cat, CD.

I miss her tremendously and only hope that she passed through the eternal wall in peace. She was a tough cat, a street-fighting cat, and she brought her instincts into her house and our hearts.

We were always slightly scared of her but her personality and occasional sweetness was rich and strong. The world feels emptier without her and I have many feelings of guilt for not reading the very odd behavior she exhibited yesterday all day.

We still don't know how she could have passed away so suddenly but I'm sad that she's not here, now.

Roaming the Cold

Before I begin to sound like the Manitoba Tourist Board, I thought I would do my best to show the possibly more harsh reality (albeit a commonly accepted one) of a city like Winnipeg. The sucky factors are:

• It's seriously cold in the winter. The average temperature in January is 7 degrees Fahrenheit.
• The closest largish Canadian city is Regina, in the province of Saskatchewan. The closest city in the U.S. is Minneapolis, Minnesota about an eight hour drive. One of the closest towns in the U.S., however, is Fargo, North Dakota.
• Getting to Winnipeg from NYC is about an eight hour trip altogether, with a layover in either Toronto, Chicago, or Minneapolis. Currently, there are no nonstop flights. (And the way airline industry is going, there may never be.)

Romancing the Cold

As noted earlier, the temperature in Winnipeg can go down to -40 Celsius in the winter. It's apparently unusual for it to get that cold but there is a reason that most non-Manitobans call the city "Winterpeg."

The cold, unlike on the East Coast, is dry and less snowy -- according to the folks I spoke with, the difference between -20 and -10 and 10 degrees is noticable but once it's cold, it's just cold.

Winnipeggers to a tee romanticize the cold weather. Guy Maddin, one of my favorite of directors, loves to play off the insanely cold the winter nights there. (J. Hoberman wrote a piece about Maddin and his latest in this week's Voice.) Other artists and artisans there relish the cold because it gives them the privilege (well, necessity) of staying inside and producing.

One might think that all of this cold-love would make for a closeted culture. What I found in Winnipeg was that the winter's grip allows groups of musicians, writers, readers, and other self-selected oddfellows to instead meet up, play, punctuate, or otherwise pontificate. There appears to be a livingroom-based, grassroots-like subculture to the place which then filters up to the rest of the city during the warmer months.

I realize that I'm going on too long about this fine city. I'll stop after tomorrow.

The Place of Time

One thing that fascinated me about living in Winnipeg last week was the sense that time itself had expanded, slightly. It wasn't that we were on vacation or that there was no sense of urgency - work and urgency are continuous sources of stress on the nature of time in New York City. It was a palpable sense that time was alive in the place.

What I found in Winnipeg was that people live in time very differently. One friend works 2 days per week and spends the other three taking care of her two older kids and reads and works in the community. Another works 6 hour days while another took six months off to catch up on baseball and books. It's not that these folks are unambitious, disinterested or slothful. In fact, it could be argued that their drive is governed by a different set of criteria which I don't know or understand because I don't own that set myself.

While in NYC, one is constantly working to catch up to where one was yesterday, it felt that, in Winnipeg, one worked to earn money to live well, which most people there do. The restaurants are by and large excellent, beautiful homes can be had for 1/3 the price of other cities, and events are very often free. It could be argued that this pleasuring of time is the Canadian Government's fault. By ensuring that all of its citizens have health insurance, people are not governed by survival alone as many people in the U.S. are; their family will be well-cared for by a doctor no matter what -- job or no job, career or temporary, sick or healthy.

I've always felt that this was the hidden benefit of government-provided health insurance and I was proven correct last week. That benefit is freedom.

MB

Was in Winnipeg, MB, the past week. [Sorry]

Pretty much the geographical center of Canada and perhaps one of the nicest North American cities I've had the pleasure of visiting.

Some quick notes on the stay:

• Lake Winnipeg, to the north of the city, is (apparently) the size of the U.K.
• The city is culturally sophisticated, diverse, kind, clean, and well-funded by the government and the Government
• Our car was stolen on Wednesday night, probably before 9:30 p.m. It was found, more or less intact, this afternoon.
• Pleasure seems to be as critical a component of Winnipeg life as it work is in New York.
• Designing products, signs, and websites for two languages throughout the country is difficult, fascinating, and politically problematic.
• The Mennonite and Jewish communities there are uniquely small and strong throughout the metropolis.
• Indians, or Aboriginals as the community is called there, are under-enfranchised; however, from my superficial observations, it appears that that community is given much more respect, attention, and historical placement in education and culture than African-Americans in this or any other state.
• It's not unusual for the temp to reach -40 degrees Celsius in the winter. That's about, well, -40 Fahrenheit.

I'm planning on devoting the rest of the week to the city, its environs, and its culture.

Nursing

I was into Sonic Youth so long ago that it almost seems decadent or (decade-ent) to be speaking about them at all; I essentially grew up on the band. I probably saw them in concert three times and own everything, gut and but. But here they are again, the Grateful Dead of our time, releasing Sonic Nurse. My notes on the album:

• screeching is good both for the ears and to refresh the soul
• stealing from Godspeed You Black Emporer is good even if they stole from SY
• the song "I Love You Golden Blue" must be about the sun in the daylit sky
• SY is deliberately political in an arcane way, which I adore - the last song on the album, "Peace Attack," speaks the line "nature sucks" which is funny and sad and the bass line is pure 1994, the end of our last (R) government
• Kim Gordon can still screech like the best of 'em

Floored

In my futile search for our landlord's cat a few days ago, up the street and around the corner, I ran into a person who I have run into numerous times before. This time I learned that his name is George and he lives on the next block over. He's lived in the neighborhood for twenty-some years and he had his large dog with him. In the past he helped me dig my car out of the snow with his gas-powered snowblower.

He helped me try to find the cat in the dark (as it was 10:30 pm) and he thought that his dog would be of assistance. Neither he nor his dog were of assistance.

George is a floorer. He refinishes, retouches, and lays down floor in old houses in Brooklyn. He said his back is gone, his knees are shot, and he is now being priced out of the market in Brooklyn because he charges $3.00 per square foot while others, who do unprofessional work, charge $1.75 per square foot. George sands the floors down just enough so that he can put three or four layers of oil-based varnish on the floors; he takes superb care to make sure that dust does not settle during the varnishing and ensures that the finished floors are perfect in every way.

I said that you would think that with all of the wealthy newbies coming into the neighborhood, they would want a quality restoration job done on their fine wood floors. He said that they were invariably cheap and that they just wanted it done fast and prettily without regard for the historical or functional nature of the flooring. He and his partner may move to Lancaster County so that he can afford to live and ply his trade.

APB (Aunt Pearl Boardman)

APB Aunt Pearl Boardman

My grandmother passed away early Friday morning, at the birth-and-death time of 4:33 a.m. I miss her dreadfully.

Aunt Pearl, so-called by me and my cousins because she is my step-grandmother, was a passionate, active, beautiful, and well-opinionated woman who would walk into a room and you immediately knew she was there. I remember coming to her house or to the "Club" so many times for Passover (about 35 times in my life) and, as I walked through the doors, there she was, arms outstretched, dark glasses on, long sleeves draping down, saying, "Hello, Bubbelah."

Aunt Pearl was not an easy person and she would often say things that would hurt you, even if that was the last thing she wanted. But mostly she had an uncanny ability to know exactly at what station in life you were and she could, in just a few seconds, gather what was bugging you and immediately jump to your aid. In college, she urged me to not worry so much. In grad school, she sent me a generous check for money to buy pans and furniture. Most recently, she advised me about business, parenting, real estate, life.

A heavy smoker, she succumbed to some form of small-cell cancer, which devoured her body in a little less than three weeks. She was diagnosed with lung cancer in September 2003 and the chemo given six months ago gave her the life she needed to die with dignity, ordering her life so that others may live more orderly.

I'm struggling very deeply with her absence. I know I should have called her more over the past eight months, when she was sick yet living. I miss her advice, both requested and unrequested. She was one of those people that seemed so invulnerable, who projected an air of certainty and elegance, who never seemed to be in pain, that, even until three weeks ago, I thought she would continue for a long, long time.

I wonder if she was ready to die. Friends and family at today's funeral said she had prepared herself these past few months -- probably in ways that few of us could ever enjoy.

But here's the harder part for me. As one eulogist more eloquently noted today, her life was a dedication to the family's continuity, to compassion for others, and to leaving the world a "better place than it was when one inherited it." As the matriarch of the family (her husband and my paternal grandmother died in 2000), she always put others before herself. But now there is no one ahead of herself. There is, in fact, no one ahead enough to take ownership of the family, to lead its gatherings, to create its ritualized Passovers, to organize its occasional occasions.

She stood alone because she was the head of the family. She now resides next to my grandfather, who she disinterred only a few weeks ago in preparation for her passing. They are head-to-head, feet apart. Their two souls, from which our small family gained so much love, sustenance, assurance and stability, are together. And I mourn.

Saturnalia

The timing of the Cassini spacecraft showing beautifully detailed black and white images of Saturn's rings couldn't be better. These pictures show our solar system unfolding in improbably delightful ways.

But here's the thing about the timing: Just when the United States seems to be at the point of self-parody, when much of the world is questioning the veracity of every U.S. foreign policy statement, and when the lies and fabulous assertions fall hollow (e.g. solving AIDS in Africa, sending humans to Mars, ending the Middle East crisis) -- American ingenuity, resources, and technology bring us these images of our brother planet Saturn. It's a relief to me, to know that Saturn's rings are as magical as they told us they were in grade school. Happy Fourth.

Division of the Divine

I always believed that I am an essentially soulful creature, a person that lives to observe and act within a world of wonder. But lately I've been thinking about the untold effects of technology on the soul, the way that the divine in all of us is formally extracted, divied up, sliced apart and thrown to the dogs.

I take for an example the cell phone, which I use constantly for both personal and business use. "Use" is the proper word because I feel both "useless" without it and I increasingly feel "used" by it. The cell phone, in its portability, its persistence and its practicality intersects my every move. When I carry it I feel an urge to be on it. When I'm not carrying it, I feel an equally awful urge to have it.

Moreover, I know this is a common complaint and I don't hold a patent on the idea of spiritual loss through technological gain. But what I've been feeling lately is that email, the Web, cell phones, and telephones generally are ways to cut up our interior lives into smaller, undigestible chunks -- components that can never been integrated again that will die within us and refuse to be made whole. They fracture our experiences of the world and its unfolding.

I used to create attachment with a place (or build presence of mind) through staring at a spot on a floor or an object or area. For me, staring creates certainty. It focuses the mind. It pushes the objective present into the subjective future. And it seems to calm frayed nerves. It seems harder to do this lately what with the demands of life and work, the actual ringing of phones and email arrivals. But further, staring (or rather, just being) is hard because of the immense anticipation of interruption. The division of the divine within all of us is real and I need to find out more before the operation is over. Any suggestions are greatly welcomed.

Crib's Gone

Today I dismantled, packed away, and put away the crib. It was time for it to go. My parents had purchased it for us and we got great use out of it, except for the times when our child would refuse to sleep in it which was about every night.

I have such mixed feelings about it. The crib was beautiful -- all stained cherry with large, slatted rails and wheels jutting out from below. The top side panels were flat and cups of milk or juice could be placed there during the night. If they were ever needed, and they were, those flat sides could be counted on in the dark, amidst the crying and the kicking.

But now the crib is gone and in its place is an off-white toddler bed, which looks like it stepped out of the country and into our city apartment. It has little slatted sides and the old, barely used crib mattress fits snugly into the new bed. The new bed is close to the ground, sweet and low.

More War Good News

A new book called Osama's Revenge: The Next 9/11 by Paul L. Williams will be sitting on bookshelves very soon. In it, Mr. Williams essentially tells us we are doomed to nuclear holocaust by Mr. Bin Laden and that it is only a matter of time that he will unleash the weapons he holds within the U.S. While I'm shaking in my boots as I write this, I am shrewd enough to know that an author seeking to make a good amount of money on a book could do worse than writing about the coming doomsday. Just for good measure, here are more books, most of them very recent, on the lovely subject.

(I realize that I'm one of the few people around that actually worry publicly about these issues and, for the life of me, I know not why.)

Mea Culpa: War on War

I was (very probably) wrong.

Many months ago, I argued in this monologue that war in Iraq, despite its likely ill effects, was relatively worthwhile. I bought the bottom line of the journalists while also questioning the veracity of the administration. It was a thinking-man's line of poor thought: if the papers and the government say it's true, it must be pretty true. I was wrong and I'm willing to admit that war in Iraq was built on trumped-up charges of state sponsored terrorism, fear-mongering, and logic based on belief instead of evidence.

Leon Wieseltier writes in this week's The New Republic a similarly kind of weak-kneed mea culpa. Much of the piece is typically astringent and non-linear journalism but one paragraph, with regard to the murder of children, spoke to me clearly, thoughtfully, and elegantly and I wish it were mine:

Of course one's own dead mean more than the other's dead, but the other's dead cannot mean nothing. The primacy of the obligation to one's own, the natural solidarity of the same, the love that precedes principle: These fundamental attainments of human association should not be taken to suggest that moral consciousness is essentially tribal. Indeed, the knowledge of our own mystic bonds is what enables us to imagine the mystic bonds of others. Since we are particular in our affections and our affiliations, we can understand particularity of affection and affiliation in general. A general understanding of particularity: That is a fine definition of universalism, and there are no escapes from universalism, except willed ones.

Subserve

I can't help but compare the aesthetics and insanity of the superbly hyped Subservient Chicken with many of the photos taken at Abu Ghraib. Milliions of people have recently "discovered" the Burger King-sponsored site, which allows visitors to control, punish, or humiliate a person in a chicken suit. By typing in commands within the site, the chicken-man abides, slowly, deliberately, and reluctantly. The photos taken at the infamous Abu Ghraib seem to show the same basic disregard for life, the same lack of shame, and the same power-wielding effect on how others are seen and can be seen.

(Susan Sontag recently wrote about the photos in the Times' Magazine but her argument is more political than it is philosophical; it is also less interesting than it could be because of this. While she does talk about the photographs of torture and sex in the context of contemporary pornography, she somehow loses track of the "artistry" of these photographs and what the aesthetic of humiliation means to all of us.)

Subterfuge

I've noticed a trendous amount of political and other subterfuge lately, much thanks to the ongoing secrecy and strangeness of the White House and those surrounding it lately. It reminds me a bit of the time when books like Pranks! were hits, back in the early 90s.

This was interesting: The Yes Men kind of make a mockery of things at a Heritage Foundation conference by nominating Ed Meese for President.

I saw today a woman today on the subway wearing a headscarf with a t-shirt underneath that obviously read "I am a Muslim."

Leonard Lopate had an American serviceman on his show today who openly but gently criticized the war in Iraq, which is unheard of, literally, during wartime.

A colleague also put together this funny little site on the Bush record.

I can't say I am in full agreement with any these actions but I can say I'm impressed that the courageous few are standing and speaking and being heard.

Amoral Social Efficiencies

Companies often point to the true efficiencies gained due to their implementation of technologies, their use of new products, or their laying off of workers. There's no question that all of these can produce more value at lower cost.

But I've always wondered about the (even more) true efficiencies of social interaction, at least in our modern capitalist economy. Efficiencies, taken without ethical considerations, are interesting because they work outside of the norms of behavior but are somehow part of them. Here are some examples, and they are Benthamist in bent and general in general:

1. Having people over to share a meal. It is highly likely that, because one is sharing food with others, that one will not poison the others through the serving of breakfast, lunch, dinner or snack. The reason is that it is difficult to assign and always be sure of which plate of food contains the ill-gotten goods.

2. Driving one's car. It's likely that an accident on the road is just that. People do not, generally, swerve purposely into someone else's car because it would prevent them from being effective -- from getting to the next place.

3. Setting fires. While it's nice to look at fire often, it does not serve one's immediate needs to set a fire in one's neigborhood as there's a good chance your possessions will be lost in the mix.

Believin'

There are a number of things that I believe in. For the record and for whatever they're worth, here they are:

• G-d exists in some definitive form outside of human knowledge or full awareness. The presence of G-d can be felt on occasion the way a cat might walk past a mirror and get a glimpse of herself but not really know that it's her reflection in the mirror.
• It's quite possible that G-d was once here and, at some point, abandoned us, as the ancient Gnostics believed.
• History is very long and life is very short. It's troubling that the present government has a strong, albeit ideologically driven, understanding of the historical past but no way to interpret it and no way to set new life and action into the world.
• Light comes from exhausted souls who seek presence in our lives.
• Human communication is necessarily frail, incomplete, and inherently tragic because everything that wants to be said to another cannot. At the same time, it's all we have to go on and we truly should be thankful for all forms of language.
• Being surprised is one of the last forms of expressed innocence we have as adults.
• In many ways, belief is the opposite of expressed innocence; it is the internalized activity of true experience.
Posted by Andrew at 11:33 PM

To Do or Not To Do

A series of lovely colds swept through the place last week, leaving my written logs incomplete. But I have a number of in-house redesigns I'd like to accomplish this week and only with you, my willful reader, will I perhaps have a chance at fulfillment thanks to the inevitable public humiliation that will follow if I dare not act:

• Redesign the MANOVERBOARD.com home page to allow for more text and updates
• Slightly revise the Deckchairs home page to allow for more color and variety
• Push Ruth Root's incredible paintings to MANOVERBOARD.net once and for all
• Send out The Telegraph, which went sadly unsent the month of March

More on the R.E. Bubble

I promise not to drag this dead horse around another time, but I was glad to see that someone on Metafilter posted a heavily commented piece on the possibility of a real real estate bubble.

(I had forgotten how great Metafilter is; I hadn't posted to it in a long, long time.)

Whitman and the Written

I was perusing a slim little design catalogue today and came across this quote by Walt Whitman which stuck with me all evening:

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle.

I recalled this passage again as I watched my daughter draw aimless strokes around a piece of paper, her eyes intently focused on the task at hand. I thought of the hour in which we're living and I recognized briefly that this was the only hour, the most precious hour of our ridiculously short lives together. And then I felt the space around her, the breath she was taking and letting out, and I watched her sing a little song while drawing. These un-selfconscious songs are composed of words she knows but doesn't necessarily understand and they feel like little chunks of the universe falling back on me when sung. I think the words were something like this: "Daddy's older, he's nine, he's older."

Number of Rooms

Recently someone asked ol' Deckchairs guy "how many rooms on [sic] titanic." Well, they didn't actually ask but they did type it into the search engine at left (or at the bottom as I'm having some CSS problems), replacing "the hell" with their request.

I did a little research and found a site that seems to offer an accurate deck composition on board the Titanic. The total number of rooms: 214 in First Class, 207 in Second Class, and 222 in Third Class. Grand total: 643 rooms.

I look forward to more queries about the Titanic through our full-featured search form!

Passion

I haven't publicly weighed in on the asinine, anti-semitic, anti-spiritual, aggressive, and agonizing aggravation called "The Passion of Christ," because so many others have written persuasively on the subject. But, if one is looking for the True Passion, the stats sure are telling.

11:59

I've always wanted to post something at 11:59 pm. I'm usually either fast asleep or in the throes of creative endeavor (or both).

I've been thinking a bit about the process or trajectory of death. I wonder if the transition between, for instance, sleep and the few moments before death and then full and utter death itself is one of comfort, repose, and certainty or instability, insecurity, and illusion. I think this is the thing that bothers me most about death -- the very act of dying, the process by which one's consciousness is sloughed off into another true state far from one's experiences or expectations.

As a Jew and a naturalist, I do believe that death, in its finality, cannot be hellish. No G-d worth his salt would want people, animals, plants, or other living things to suffer in eternity -- which is a very long time I've heard. But as a paranoic, or at the very least a modernist, I wonder if there a screech between the two states, a hurried and lousy rush of feeling, a tension among a million competing parts for the soul to be pulled out into nothingness (or everythingness). I guess I also wonder if that is felt always or sometimes, depending upon the state of the dying and the partiality or fullness of consciousness, which brings me back to sleep, which I must now do.

37

Thirty seven years ago today, I was born.

If this was 1850, I'd have one more year to live, on average.

Things that broke this week

• The VCR -- even after trying to clean it, it just won't run anymore
• My cell phone -- dead unless it's hooked up to the wall
• The lights overhead in the office -- tried to change them but it's not the 100 watt bulbs
• Adobe Acrobat and Illustrator -- see this nice story
• My handsfree telephone headset -- battery went out twice

And it's only Tuesday evening!

Crappo

It's such terrible weather outside right now. Cold rain, icy streets, dark clouds. The skies look as if they are falling in on the earth, the air outside is nothing but raindrops, the color of everyone is grey. The cats inside are blinking their tired eyes and, for some reason, the lightbulbs here are humming. I wonder about the animals and the people who are outside and who aren't going home because they don't have one. I'm thinking about how luxurious it is to write under artificial light, in dryness, and on a newish keyboard.

A number of years ago I re-visited Majdanek, the concentration camp of concentration camps. In the middle of the camp there is a large mausaleum, where thousands of pounds of cremated bodies lie open to the wind and the public. The camp stands today, idly and the town around it grows. When I was there, it rained and poured and I was drenched. The wooden barracks smelled of death but were dry.

The world is wet and it appears that our entire civilization is built around keeping some dry.

2

A certain someone turned two recently and I can't help but reflect not only on these past few years but upon the nature of the past and its reflection on the lives we lead now. There is a deep part of me that believes that the past never existed and the future will never be here -- but as I approach my later years, I know this is not true.

Further, it's this complex of suspicions, arrogance, and insecurity that makes me question the past and how it is and how it lives in our lives. Afterall, I look at the photos of this certain someone and note the change in expressions, in bodily form, in composition, and in personhood, all of which are either communicated through photography or have accomodated our drive for having those things communited to us. But I'm less interested in how someone like Susan Sontag would describe the perception of the world through these images than I am in the way that I now interpret the past through the scrim of these photos and how that veil is more or less a distant shadow of me.

Let me try to be more clear. I see an image from the past. I know that person and that time of my life inherently, coherently. It moves me and I then see the world as someone would after my death, through my eyes, without them being me and perhaps never knowing me. It's as if the photos are personal and profoundly apart from me and the shadows they cast are that of death, which is both personal and profoundly apart from me as well.

Mad

I watched the ball drop last night on television and then went to sleep. I felt absolutely little connection to the hoopla that was going on only about 7 miles from me in Times Square, which was strange in that I could barely feel the immense human energy and excitement emerging from the tube.

It's not that I'm cynical or skeptical about New Year's or that I have bad feelings about it. Afterall, I met my wife on New Year's a number of years ago. But in listening to the fireworks going on overhead and the shouts of men beneath the window, I couldn't figure out where the celebration was coming from. Were people happy to be alive another year? Were they simply drunk and happy? Or does the new year mark a happy moment for people who are ordinarily pretty happy?

Happy new year!

Cards

I'm sending out the annual holiday calendars to clients, friends, ex's, colleagues, partners, vendors, family, and others who I like a bit (not in that order). As I was carefully going through the list of people and their addresses, I realized a few things:

1. I've refused over the years to delete those who have passed away from my contact lists. I can't do it, but these folks should not rightly be mixed in with the living, right? I'm not sure what to do with these entries, including my grandmother who died over one year ago. Obviously, I'm not sending those are dead calendars nor will I need their contact info. Why must I keep them and am I "contaminating" the rest of the people populating my rolodex?

2. There are so many people that I've lost touch with in the past five years. If you happen to be reading this, my apologies. If you're not reading this it's because you've lost touch with me as well.

3. I tried printing out the list (it's about 1000 entries) on one sheet of paper and it looks really, really tremendous.

Happy Thanksgiving

Wishing you a day full of pleasantries, little social friction, healthful food, a feeling of calm and well-being, and thoughtful gifts of thought.

Marathon

I watched a great friend complete the Philadelphia Marathon today at 11:58:08 (I think). Althought I've been here in New York for many years, I've never actually thought of attending a marathon (let alone participate in one).

But watching my pal complete the 26.2 mile course around the entire city was not only a milestone for him, but one for me. I saw not only the spirit of pure individualistic athleticism but the mysterious advances of almost perpetual motion on the human form. I witnessed a woman weeping as she crossed the finish line. I watched a man in a wheelchair fly across the finish, arm muscles bulging brightly. I saw two retired-looking women cascade through the gates together, almost holding hands. I felt the pain of one woman who walked through the finish line after stopping every 5 seconds to look at her evidently badly hurting foot. I saw one man do push-ups on the pavement only six yards from the finish as the crowd gushed. And I saw sheer glory in the smiling faces of people cheering others' accomplishments, on the largest scale in the smallest form.

D and D

The startling number of deaths, including today's story in which "17 U.S. Soldiers Die in Iraq Copter Crash" is truly unnerving. It makes me think of the old saying that "Every is political," because all of these deaths are. But it also makes me think that every death is also truly alone, that every individual, couched in his or her cocoon of personal armaments and hidden monologues, is supremely final, forever, foreign.

This came up time and again after the WTC came crashing down. Commentators asked of us to imagine what these people thought about and felt during the hour or so of panic before their tumble to earth -- and it was easy to imagine the hell because it was televised. But for almost every other person in the world who is about to die, we only ask locally to imagine their life, at the funeral, the wake, and the graveyard. The public is safely away from it all. Are we thankful or relieved by this? Are we well served by our distance from others' private deaths?

Was

I was showing photos of our family and friends to our daughter this evening. This has become a favorite part-time pasttime for us, which I find moving, difficult, and thrilling all at the same time. The pictures dislodge memories of younger days, when I looked wiser and more alive, and the baby pictures remind me of those squawking first few weeks that gave life to a new being. Some of the photographs depict people who are no longer alive, like my grandmother. I told my daughter, "this was my grandmother," and as the words rolled out, I found myself drowning in the word "was," a word not like any other, a word that shows the finiteness of our being in three long letters and one syllable. I also thought about how the word "was" somehow indicates objectness -- a non-human quality, as if the coil sloughed off of us is an it and not part of us.

No. Korea

Sometimes it's important for me to note whether a country with nukes has the capacity to blow us up. It appears, from the news today, that North Korea perhaps has two bombs ready to go. Heartening. Then I went to look at who owned northkorea.com just to make sure that one couldn't just push a button on their site and send a missle over to Japan. It seems the owner is Reflex Publishing, which appears to be a crappy web development and content company that happened to purchase during the "height," domains like humor.com, baseball.com, and, well, northkorea.com. Why would someone own northkorean.com? Why would someone check who owns northkorea.com?

A.S.

What can one intelligently say about Mr. Schwarzenegger and his recent win in California? I would argue that absolutely nothing can be said of any substance or consequence. Sure, there will be cover stories in Time, Newsweek, and US News and World Report. Sure the pundits will get a story out of it. It's not incredible in these days that he won, nor is it a precedent.

I wish California lots of luck.

White House 2004

A quick bookmark-like but important political post. Here are nice and neat link lists of both Democrats and Republicans running for the office of President of the United States in 2004. (Most of the design is kind of fugly, but that's another post.)

Democrats
Republicans

Cash

I'm not stunned about the death of Johnny Cash, but I am deeply affected by it. I'm not sure why -- I only recently converted to his music (perhaps 3 years ago when I met my wife) and I really only know his standards and his rock re-makes, which are terribly mournful. (His cover of NIN's "Hurt" is as unforgettable as is he and cuts to the core of the man.)

In part I think my sadness about his death, which oddly coincides with that of the talented actor John Ritter, can be attributed to the fact that he deeply felt and made others feel all through his life. This is a rare feat, and one that I often wish I had truly pursued. It's the life of an artist, of course, but it's also the life of someone who rarely compromised, who took extensive risks with his work and personal ife, and who was faithful to his core even while trembling. Johnny Cash, unlike John Ritter, was perhaps one of the most important artists of the 20th century, up there with Picasso, Dylan, and Guston.

I actually miss him and, listening to his last album this afternoon, I hung my head.

Origin of Deckchairs on the Titanic.

Many people have written me about the origin or original meaning of the aphorism "Arranging the Deckchairs on the Titanic," and I've spent a good deal of time researching it on the Web, with very little to show for it. The saying essentially means, of course, doing ridiculous activites in the face of crippling adversity. I believe that the title, recommended by friend V.S. for this blog a few years ago, is ironically apt and, in fact, perhaps applies to many weblogs. I mean this as a compliment.

More interestingly, I asked a Google Researcher to help with finding more information about the aphorism and I found, much to my great surprise, that it originates sometime in the early 1970s, when I was a tike, and not in the 1920s, when I was, well, nothing. It appears that the phrase was originally in reference to PR debacle. The researcher, who was paid for his services through the excellent Google Answers wrote:

The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (5th Ed. 1999), page 533, lists a
quotation from the Washington Post, 16 May 1976, by Rogers Morton,
American public relations officer: "I'm not going to rearrange the
furniture on the deck of the Titanic." The context, according to the
dictionary, was that Morton had lost five of the last six primaries as
President Ford's campaign manager.

I'll write more about this later, but here is the full Google report.