This Is Not News

I still have one curling match left on my DVR to watch, but I gotta say I’m happy to see that the United States’ men’s curling team beat Great Britain for the bronze medal today, the first American medal in curling. (Granted, curling has only been a medal sport since ’98. Still, a first’s a first.) Yes, there’s a certain amount of home-country jingoism going there, but c’mon, how can you root against a guy who owns his own pizzeria? (Pete Fenson, the team captain or “skip,” owns a couple of places in Minnesota, so you know he was happy to go to Italy.) And according to this news brief, CNBC and MSNBC have been getting a million-plus viewers for their daily curling coverage. Granted, that’s still kind of a niche audience, but those are record numbers for those networks.

Now I just hope someone’s going to televise the Men’s World Championship in April. And that Fenson and his team qualify to represent the U.S.

One of the things I love about the Internet is the high likelihood that whatever crazy thing I’m interested in, someone out there has put up a web page. Witness, for example, Resurrect Dead, a site devoted to the Toynbee Tile phenomenon.

What’s that? You don’t know about the Toynbee tiles? Neither do most people I try to point them out, sadly. When I was in college in New York, I started noticing that on several streets, someone had somehow embedded a series of tiles into the street that formed the message “Toynbee Idea/In Movie 2001/Resurrect Dead/On Planet Jupiter.” Over the years, I would see more and more of the things pop up, and I would often exclaim to Pattie, “Hey! See those tiles? Were they there the last time we walked on this street?” And she would give me this look like I was completely deranged. (And now we’ve been married for six years. Who’s the deranged one now, eh?) Then I moved back down here, and was surprised to find the tiles throughout Philly as well, including a business-card sized version right at Temple. I eventually discovered a handful of sites devoted to tracking the tiles, which have appeared in cities all over the Western Hemisphere, including Toynbee.net and the afmorementioned Resurrect Dead. From the latter I learned that the tiles first started cropping up in Philly back in the 80s – I had no idea we were the Toynbee Tile capital of the world.

And in a not-quite-ironic development, as I began researching Jane Addams and Hull House, I discovered that she was inspired to start the settlement house by a visit to the world’s first settlement – London’s Toynbee Hall, named for the very fellow who, according to the tiles at least, wants to turn Jupiter into one jumping mortuary.

ReddHedd over at Firedoglake has a tremendous post up today talking about the importance of a society taking care of its own, and how much harder that seems to be to do today. It doesn’t really have any answers, but it does a great job at starting to ask some key questions. It is somewhat political in tone, trying to figure out how the Democratic Party can reclaim the values in question. But I think it also speaks to a truth beyond politics.

Sal Palantonio has a column up on ESPN.com saying that Eagles coach Andy Reid needs to change his ways and relinquish some of his decision-making authority within the organization. He says, “the team needs an independent advocate, somebody separated from the management structure that has run the Eagles franchise with very mixed results.”

OK. The Eagles made the playoffs for five straight years before this season, when everything went to heck. They made the Super Bowl last year and only lost by three points. The franchise is much loved in the city, sells tons of merchandise, has been an attractive target for free agents for the last several years, has an impressive new stadium, and generates ungodly amounts of cash. This is “very mixed results”? I would love to have results that mixed in any of my personal projects. “Dave Thomer and his colleagues led Not News to very mixed results, with only 20 million readers, a book deal, and the first Pulitzer ever given to a blog-based philosophical treatise.”

That’s the crazy thing about sports. If you are not THE BEST, you are somehow failing. Imagine if every profession were like that? If there were only one sports journalist who could be successful at any given time, and the rest considered losers? Heck, even politics isn’t that much of a zero-sum game.

Ah well. Wait ’til next year.

One of the feeds I track on my home page is Wil Wheaton’s blog. Recently he put up a fairly long post following up on an essay he wrote for Salon about Christmas dinner with his parents. A political discussion turned emotional, and when Wil wrote about it, his parents thought he was being unfair, so he tried to set the record straight. I read the post on Wil’s site, and then noticed that he had cross-posted it as a diary at Daily Kos. It’s kind of fascinating to see the difference in the comments sections. At Wil’s site, the focus tends to be on the emotional content, talking to Wil about the pain he clearly felt, the mistake he felt he had made, and the effort he was making to atone. Since Wil’s readership includes some conservatives who disagree with his politics, there’s also a certain amount of effort to continue the “let’s try to understand each other” theme of the followup post, and a few posts that try to engage the political debate. Over at dKos, it’s a much more charged and partisan atmosphere, which includes some posters criticizing Wil for backing down from his parents and letting himself be emotionally manipulated and others telling Wil that regardless of his protests to the contrary, his father is, in fact, a wingnut.

Some of this is no doubt tied to the different natures of the two communities. One is a personal community built around fans of Wil Wheaton. The other is a community of charged partisans. But that provides an example of how the contexts that we put ourselves in can shape the perceptions that we form and the responses we make. Which suggests that we should not get so commited to them that we react with anger and vitriol when we’re faced with disagreement.

But then again, I don’t want to seem like I’m being so wishy-washy that I don’t think there’s ever such a thing as being right in a discussion. There’s a certain amount of intellectual gymnastics you have to go through in order to simultaneously hold a position and try and convince someone else it’s the right one while you also leave yourself open to being convinced to go the other way. From time to time the effort makes me a little dizzy, but I believe it’s worth it.

Shaking off the last of the holiday fatigue. I hope everyone out there had at least half a good as time as I did over the last few days. We got a lot of my mom’s side of the family together for a Christmas brunch, in which I got to don my new Alton Brown apron and make pancakes while others in the family built a truly epic fruit salad.

I got a copy of The Complete Calvin & Hobbes, on which more later, but let me say today’s FoxTrot strip is not kidding around.

Lifting the books may be the first step in an exercise regimen, which I think I’m gonna need to start if I eat too many more pancakes.

Amazon did manage to get most of packages here by Christmas Eve, including all of the gifts I needed to give out. The one box that’s missing is just as well, because I think I want to invest in a new bookcase before any more books get here.

We decided to try something new this year. We’re buying our Christmas supplies for 2006 now, while everything’s on clearance. I’m not an expert in the time value of money, but I’m pretty sure buying now at 50% off beats buying in 50 weeks at full price after inflation.

All the new reading material from Christmas hopefully means I’ll have lots of blogging fodder in the next few days. For right now I find myself trying to reimmerse myself in the usual routines. And I should probably start gathering the paperwork for tax season. Right after I take another nap.

Related to the last post – I’m sitting at my desk with an open can of Coke in each hand, making sure that every one of the four on my desk are empty.

I go upstairs to throw out the cans and see the Holy Ghost newsletter on the table. Then I realize the annual R.E.M. holiday fan club package is also in the mail. This year there’s a DVD, so I grab it and the newsletter and head downstairs again. The DVD has two live performances from a concert in Germany, including a performance of “Turn You Inside-Out,” a song from Green, an album I first started listening to in high school. It feels appropriate.

I’m making my way through the newsletter, checking out the alumni news. One of my old classmates just had a baby. We’re all growing up, that’s for sure.

I start reading a column by Edward Glowienka, an alum from the class of 2000, who’s teaching philosophy at a Spiritan missionary in Tanzania. And I see him telling a story about the late Diane Garforth.

Damn.

I knew Mrs. Garforth had passed away from cancer this past May. I heard about it at the wedding of one of my old friends from the school paper. In retrospect, I think I was so stunned I didn’t feel anything. Tonight I got to the back of the newsletter and saw her picture and read the tribute penned by Mrs. Osborne, my sophomore year homeroom teacher and one of the nicest people that exist on this planet. And now I’m laughing and crying.

Ed’s story was about Mrs. Garforth rejecting a paper he had written, saying that he was capable of better work. And oh, that is so true to who she was. I had her for freshman lit, at a time when Holy Ghost rearranged the order of its periods every day. I can remember the bemused look when I walked into her room at the wrong time. More to the point, I remember how she ripped the first paper I wrote in high school to shreds. She had no patience for anything less than your best effort. But most of the time, you could be sure the high demands were because she cared and because she knew you were up to the task.

I do think that in a lot of ways I disappointed her. She didn’t seem too happy with my interest in journalism, or my fondness for science fiction. I think she saw something more serious and literary-minded in my future. And she definitely didn’t approve of my choice of colleges, something that I felt no small amount of bitterness about. But she was someone I always made sure to see when I visited the school, and she always cared to know how I was doing.

More than anything else, the thing that made Holy Ghost the school that it was is that Mrs. Garforth was far from alone there. So many of those teachers cared, damn it. You could feel it. I could, anyway. And that made such a difference. I wouldn’t be where I am now, I wouldn’t be in front of a classroom at al, if it weren’t for their inspiration. If it weren’t for her, and for so many like her.

So, thank you, Mrs. Garforth. Thank you.

The medal design for the 2006 Turin Winter Olympic games has been unveiled and they’re looking very…Homer Simpson-friendly. There is a reason for the design, it seems. Something about an open piazza or town square. Center of Italian village life, etc. O-kay. You know how seriously Italians take design so I guess we should have seen this coming.

I’m also guessing that they are going to blow Greece out of the water with the amount of bizarre artistic imagery they can cram in the opening ceremonies. Brace yourself, Costas.

So somewhere before dawn on Thursday I was roasting a turkey breast for dinner later that day. While I was waiting for the bird to be done I was reading Daily Kos, where a bit of a shouting match developed between a few commenters and diarists over the use of the term “trail of tears� in contexts other than the forced exodus(es) that claimed many Native American lives in the 1800s. The argument itself seemed to open some other festering issues inside the community, but what struck me was a comment that there are Narive Americans who observe the fourth Thursday of November as a National Day of Mourning. Then later Thursday night we were watching Survivor, where the contestants are camping in a Mayan ruin, where two contestants won a reward challenge to go to a natural hot spring by answering trivia questions about Mayan culture, and where for the immunity challenge contestants had to answer questions based on a story from Mayan folklore – an ancient civilization, rendered extinct and eventually turned into entertainment to sell ad time.

It was definitely a day of some cognitive dissonance. I had to acknowledge to myself that the life I have – with luxuries and opportunities that so many other people on this planet would find unimaginable – is in some part the product of severe injustices committed in the past, injustices whose effects have not been ameliorated but rather compounded over time. But I also pushed that thought out of my mind to focus on the next task I wanted to accomplish. I don’t know if there’s a truly satisfying way to resolve this kind of moral conflict on an individual level. But I’m having a sneaking suspicion that what I have been doing isn’t enough. This is one I’m gonna need to think about some more.

The political news this weekend is probably the firestorm around Democratic Congressman Jack Murtha of Pennsylvania calling for a redeployment of the troops in Iraq. Murtha may be from my home state, but he’s from the western side of the commonwealth, so I have only been vaguely aware of him up to now. Kagro X at The Next Hurrah had a terrific post pulling together the reasons why his voice on military matters holds so much weight.

Clearly there was an impact because Republicans in the House tried to pull a maneuver Friday night to either embarrass Murtha or force other House Democrats to disavow his position and support the war. The stunt went haywire. Murtha had suggested that Congress pass a joint resolution calling for the orderly redeployment of troops and a continued use of diplomacy, which would include introductory language that established the reasons for such a move. House Republicans instead offered a one-paragraph sense-of-the-House resolution simply calling for the immediate termination of operations in Iraq. Again, for the parliamentary distinctions, check out Kagro. At one point, a newly-elected Representative from Ohio named Jean Schmidt quoted a Marine who asked her to send a message to Murtha that “cowards cut and run, Marines never do.� Thing is, Murtha is an ex-Marine. The House was in an uproar until Schmidt retracted her remarks.

Now, I’m not sure how this is all going to play out over the next few weeks. Public support for the war is clearly dropping, but I just don’t know if it’s going to have any effect on the government’s decisions in the short term. What I have found interesting, as yet another example of history repeating itself, is the way opponents of the war are characterized as disrespecting our troops and aiding the enemy. (Check out this post from Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo for another example.) There’s a particular incident about Jane Addams, one of the leaders of the settlement house movement and a major progressive force at the turn of the century, that Jean Elshtain cites in her book Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy and which I frequently think about these days.
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