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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.
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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.

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.

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

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.