Manistee National Forest

Headde up to Northern Michigan for a backpacking trip this weekend.  Had a great time. Some of the highlights included the car getting stuck and subsequently removed from a snow drift.  A very cold night/morning on Friday/Saturday. Successfully making coffee Saturday morning, which I credit with keeping me Alive / Motivated  to start the hike, and some beautiful scenery.  Uploaded some pictures that I liked.  Can't wait to get back out there or anywhere else. 

 

 

 

 

Tuesday Poll

I'm going to start trying to introduce some recurring posts, mostly as a cop-out of having to think of posts as regularly.

Tuesdays are going to be poll days. You can find the polling button at the top right of the main page. Please vote.

Today's question is inspired by a comment that I heard on NPR in the drive in this morning. (I specify NPR not because it makes me sounds like a New England College Professor in multiple committed relationships. But because the subject matter). Today apparently is Paris's B-day and the announcer introduced her as "Socialite and factor in the 2008 Presidential campaign."

This made me think of some other potential NPR/Paris synergies and the poll is a result of that.

Please vote early and often and include any ideas that I missed out in the comments.

Tribute Post

I've been a bit busy at work and I want to use that as an excuse for my lack of blogging, but who isn't so I will avoid.  I also was on the road last week, but seeing as that has been the norm for about 2.5 years, I really can't use that as a good excuse either.  So maybe I go excuse-less and just try to pick up where I left off. 

I had planned on taking some time to write a nice thoughtful post, but after nosamrellim made such a nice request for a post, I thought it was better idea to change my blogging format a bit, so this is my take on the nosamrellim format, but with the Andy twist, despite it being a nosamrellim tribute post, any shortcomings and/or offense caused are all my own.

1. Wine corks are an awful idea.  I mean cork was the height of packaging technology about the time that wine was invented. But X,000 year later, can't we do better.  I can't count the number of times that I've either broke a cork, or had to cork a bottle of wine because I suck at getting the cork out.  Now I'm not talking about every other bottle or anything, but it's one of those things where you only remember if it has gone wrong. I don't remember the 99 time I successfully opened a bottle of wine, but i sure as hell remember 6 weeks ago when I accidentally pushed a cork through the bottle and the wine sprayed up and got all over my shirt.  I can't remember ever having ruined a shirt trying to open a beer?  It's really hard to jam a screw top down a bottle.

Furthermore, not only is cork sub-optimal in terms of ease, it also poses a significant risk to the quality of the wine.  When you taste wine at a restaurant, you aren't tasting it to see if you like it, you're tasting it to see if the cork has malfunctioned and the wine is now vinegar! This would only be an ingrained part of the wine experience if it was a relatively common occurrence. 

So cork is neither easier nor better at it's sole purposes which is preserving wine.  The only reason we still use it is tradition. And I'll admit that there is something to that, but with so much tradition in wine anyway, can't we take a pass on the cork.  Leave the French pronunciations, but for the sake of my pride and my dress shirts, I really hope we see more screwtop wine soon. 

2. One thing that there isn't enough of out there is people passing out pamphlets.  I love people who pass out pamphlets.  Yes! Give them to me. Let's communicate, share your ideas with me in a polite and passive way.  I don't want to be shouted at, I don't want you asking me "Do you have 5 mins for the environment," (which is insulting to the environment and my intelligence). But yeah, if you care enough to print something up, I want to read it. 

I grabbed one the other day outside my grocery store for vegetarianism. I looked at it and read it.  It took me maybe 5 mins, I read it while I was walking, and then threw it away.  I still remember what it said.  I'm not going to become a vegetarian, but i definitely thought about the pamphlet when I was ordering a slice of pizza later that night.  (I got cheese). 

It's not that I think I or many other people are going to be swayed by pamphlets, or that something going to change the world (although, I guess just ask Thomas Paine for proof that they can) but I really like the idea of people reaching out to others with their ideas. It's kinda like a blog, but a lot more personal. Thanks to google I do have some sense who reads this blog, but only in terms of bits and bytes. If I was printing up a pamphlet, standing on a corner and looking these people in the eye, I know I would feel a more personal connection to this thing.  It's good to hear new (even wacky) ideas about vegetarianism, Scientology or (wacky)Ron Paul.  Now I may think your idea/Ron Paul is ridiculous, but it still does me a world of good to hear about it. So keep passing that stuff out, I'm going to keep grabbing them. 

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Bankruptcy Update

Just so everyone is aware.  The foray into reader bankruptcy and rebirth has been a massive failure.
 
Not only did my unread posts count climb quickly back into the 000's (like in 2 days) but unsubscribing hasn't seemed to help the problem one bit. Now I have been busy the past few weekends, and focusing on reading a couple different books before bed, but at the same time, I find it hard to believe that I am simply incapable of keeping up.
What's worse is that the blogs that are causing the most trouble are some of the ones that I really value.  Huff Post, The Guardian, Gizmodo and others who posts on an obscene frequency, a pace that I'll never catch up to, but who's posts I really do value. 
I'm at a bit of an impasse it seems.  I genuinely think I would be better served to control my reading list, but at the same time I really want to keep these blogs.  One option that I've considered it getting the Huff Post on the Kindle, and unsubscribing. I'm not sure if this is the way to go however, since I'm a bit uncertain about paying for the Kindle version for a blog that I can get for free.  Regardless, I'm going to give it a few more weeks and see if I can get caught up.  If not, I need to reevaluate something.
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North Country

As I type I'm driving back from a great ski weekend in Wisconsin. A lot of good friends (including a surprise visit from a fellow blogger who I don't get to see enough), good beer, good food and good midwestern skiing.

There's something really refreshing about the northwoods and being outside. At one point during the evening we all walked down to the frozen lake that our friends cabin was on. We walked out onto the ice with some beers and crawled through the 2-3 feet of powder that accumulated up there. Standing there staring at the stars it was a really cool feeling. Cold air on your face, fresh everything. Fresh air, fresh snow. I think it really taps into the part of the human condition that needs space, and needs contact with nature and needs raw, unrefined experience. Everything we do/eat/feel has been processed, shipped pasteurized, filtered. To get a raw experience every now and then is so critical to who we are. Putting down the brita, staying outside a little longer in the cold, feeling sore as hell from moving up and down a mountain all weekend.

I'm really lucky to be able to experience these things, and really lucky to have friends who do them with me, and lucky to have friends who share there nice things, cars, cabins etc that make it work.

All in all and fantastic weekend. Attached are some rudimentary pics.
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apologies

Apologies for the absence. I am heading up north for a ski trip to WI/MI so hopefully I'll be able to bang out some posts on the long drive to and fro.

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Engagement

Just watched a very good film, Lions for Lambs. Good themes, civic engagement, duty, honor. It's interesting because for as good of a movie as it is, and for as good as the cast was, I really hadn't heard anything about it.

The idea of civic engagement is a good one. One interesting thing about the movie was that it was very Greek themed. Not Greek like I was Greek, but I'm talking about ideas of the polis, the idea of being a citizen. Not in the passive sense that so many of us seem to enjoy that concept, of having rights bestowed on us in exchange for taxes and stopping at stop signs. But being an active citizen, engaging, debating, acting and all the good, active parts of culture that people seem so happy to shy away from.

There was another movie (based on a book of course) that also addressed ideas like this, 'Starship Troopers.' Yes believe it or not, 'Starship Trooper' was based on political theory, and a uniquely Greek Political Theory as well. 'ST' was about voting, and in that world, voting was only a right bestowed upon those who had served.

It's interesting how these Greek theories of the Polis, and the Demos still emerge, how they are still so rooted in our culture and heretiage, a heritage not of physical ancestry, but of moral, political and ethical ancestry. All valuable ideas. Maybe like another Greek was famous for saying, "there's nothing new under the Sun"


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Declaring Reader Bankruptcy

I love my Google Reader.  Love it almost too much.  I have somewhere north of 60 active RSS feeds that it pulls from everyday. I've never been really good about managing these feeds however, the posts pile up, thousands of them at a time. Not that it is necessarily a bad thing, but it does clutter up my reading experience.  I've taken to reading the New York Times on my Kindle every morning, but still my Google reader feeds still serve as a primary source of news, especially on some more specialized interests like tech/gadgets and the legal world, but it's also my best and main source for taking in commentary. What I want to do is to use this source of news, knowledge and information better, I want to immerse myself more in the topics and writers who I really care about, and drop the ones who just add noise. I trust myself to innately make decisions about what's important for me, but it's hard to monitor those decisions when each feed has hundreds of unread posts, and each category has thousands. So as of last night I have declared Reader Bankruptcy ( concept stole from Fred Wilson's Email Bankruptcy, who's blog never goes unread)I'm going to monitor my reading for the next week or two.  At the end of that period, I'm going to cull the feeds that have the highest percent of their material unread. This is of course an on-going process, I hopefully will be adding and deleting feeds most constantly now. The quantitative goal i am setting for myself is to never have more than 100-200 unread articles on the Reader.  I plan on posting my trends data as this goes on to hopefully track this progress. In the same vein, I also want to begin expanding some of my feed selections so, if anyone out there has any feed recommendations, I would love to hear them.


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Honesty and the public sphere

I have to be honest, originally, I thought that the Tim Geithner tax situation was no big deal. From what I understood at first, he was working for an organization that didn't withhold tax for the US gov't and given how complicated our tax code can be, it didn't surprise me that there were errors, sure 30-40K seems like a lot, but when you are operating at the income levels that a lot of senior public officials operate at, not unsurprising.

But as more information has come out, much of it condemning to Geithner, and painting him more as a tax evader or at the very least an opportunist, I have begun to re-think my position.

Where the defense previously was "well it was a human error!" I could buy that, but if the reason for confirming him now is that "it in our national interest to look the other way on this..." I just can't get in line behind that.

How quickly some people seem to forget that it is the lack of transparency, and opportunistic greed that got us into the economic mess we are in now. Not only does appointing Geithner send the wrong message about the important steps towards transparency and reconciliation that we need to take, but I also question his fundamental strength of character to help lead this country out of our dark hour.

I have given Obama a lot of leeway in appointing people whom I feel represent a bit of a betrayal on ideological ground, but I'm ok with that, there is nothing wrong with a lefty president appointing left-center advisors. But I do have a problem if he betrays the trust I and so many others have put in him to be a more honorable and just leader, Geithner's tax evasion represents an old, and a wrong way of doing things, and no amount of smarts or connections can make that right.

I sincerely hope that BHO withdraws the Geithner nomination. Otherwise I've found my first great disappointment a lot sooner than I have hoped or expected.


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telling

I thought this was a pretty telling photo from the "Youth Ball" at the Inauguration. It's a Digital Youth...