There may be a literal link to an incandescent lightbulb flashing on, and creativity:

The researchers first wanted to see if light bulbs actually were unconsciously linked to enlightenment in people’s minds. In a preliminary experiment, 73 college students watched as words were flashed across a computer screen. They viewed 10 words associated with insight – such as create, conceive, and envision -10 other words and 20 non-words. They were then asked to respond as quickly and as accurately as possible if what they were shown was a word or non-word.

 Then they controlled for the bulbs themselves:

The students had either a bare, unshaded incandescent 25-Watt light bulb or an overhead fluorescent light turned on in the room. Volunteers exposed to the light bulb responded quicker to words linked to insight than other words, supporting the notion that light bulbs were indeed connected to insight in their minds.

 To see if light bulbs could actually promote insights, Slepian and his colleagues next gave college students spatial, math and verbal problems to solve and had either a bare light bulb or an overhead fluorescent light turned on in the room partway into the problem. The volunteers either solved the problems faster or more often with the light bulb than with the fluorescent light.

Thus the left’s push for compact fluorescents literally is dumbing down America.

America’s big advantage in the Revolution, says popular American history, is the American tradition of marksmanship.  The British, marching in their red coats through the woods, were hapless targets for backwoodsmen with Pennsylvania and Kentucky rifles that could score aimed hits on man-sized targets from four times the effective range of the British smoothbore muskets. 

While the conventional narrative is simplistic (the average Continental Army soldier was not a backwoodsman or a marksman), it’d seem that the Brits have managed to even things out; a British sniper has scored the longest-ranged kill in the history of the rifle:

Corporal of Horse Craig Harrison fired his consecutive shots from such a long distance that they took almost three seconds to reach their targets.

This was despite the 8.59mm bullets leaving the barrel of his rifle at almost three times the speed of sound.

The distance to his two targets was 8,120ft, or 1.54 miles – according to a GPS system – and about 3,000ft beyond the weapon’s effective range.

The 35-year-old beat the previous sniper kill record of 7,972ft, set by a Canadian soldier who shot dead an al Qaeda gunman in March 2002.

Not one hit at a mile and a half; three consecutive ones:

Speaking about the incident, Cpl of Horse Harrison said: “The first round hit a machine gunner in the stomach and killed him outright. He went straight down and didn’t move.

“The second insurgent grabbed the weapon and turned as my second shot hit him in the side. He went down, too. They were both dead.”

The serviceman then fired a third and final round to ensure the machine gun was out of action.

Can America put up with this usurpation of our heritage?

I saw this a while ago, and laughed…

…because (ask my kids) I’ve been doing this for years.

…that makes as much sense to English majors as it does to math majors:

A few weeks ago, I spent a little tax refund money on a corporate-surplus Lenovo Thinkpad T60.  I love it so far – fast, clean, tons and tons of memory, and of course I’ve been using Thinkpads at one job or another for the past 12 years or so, so I don’t take any convincing about what good machines they are. 

But it’s got one interesting bug that’s got me stumped.

The wireless adapter will run just fine – indeed, it gets a signal pretty much everywhere in the house, which is something I’ve never managed with laptops before this. 

But periodically, the Adapter will switch itself to “disabled”.  The period varies – it can run just fine for a day or two, or it can flip in ten minutes.    I usually wind up going to the Network Connections control panel and clicking to Enable the Wireless Network Connection (which will usually spawn an “Enabling” dialog, and then flash a quick “Enable failed” message.  Then I reboot Windows (XP) and things work fine.

Anyone know what the problem is, and what I can do to fix it?

Thanks in advance.

It’s April 6th – Tartan Day in America.  The day to celebrate all things Scots.

Today, Scots-Americans will to the traditional Tartan Day celbration; we’ll stream through downtowns across America, Saint Paul and Minneapolis included, clutching ill-concealed liquor bottles. wearing fake plastic kilts and red wigs,  and blaring on noisemakers (or bagpipes). Politicians and media people will prepend “Mac-” to their names and recite Keats and Burns before crowds of cheering onlookers.

Large, unruly parades led by bagpipe bands will step through slicks of vomit (tinted blue, from the blue-dyed stout and single-malt whiskey that’ll be lubricating the good times) amid hordes of tartan or blue-and-white clad, kilt-bedecked revelers, wending their way to both City Halls, where the crowds will paint their faces a merry Saint Andrew’s Blue and moon the government, bellowing “Ye can take our booze, but ye canna take our FREEDOM!”

The questions they should ask themselves is the ones all the rest of you should ask today; without Scots-Americans, would there even be an America as we know it?

From the framers of the Declaration of Independence to the first man on the moon, Scottish-Americans have contributed mightily to the fields of the arts, science, politics, law, and more. Today, over eleven million Americans claim Scottish and Scotch-Irish roots — making them the eighth largest ethnic group in the United States. These are the people and the accomplishments that are honored on National Tartan Day, April 6th.

So put some Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders or Simple Minds on your IPod (you do have some Argylls – right?  Or the Black Watch?

It’s Tartan Day, 2010.  Rejoice!

Peter Suderman notes that the Federal Communications Commission is poking its nose into regulating the Internet.

But that’s not the main issue.  The question is not whether we need the FCC at all:

The FCC’s entire approach is to rule by impulse and expand its reach whenever and wherever possible. Recent FCC actions include investigating the approval process Apple employs in its iPhone App Store, mulling whether and how phone companies might upgrade their networks and passing judgment on various consumer devices of minimal likely importance, such as the Palm Pixi.

The FCC is a crank-and-wire institution in a nanocircuit age:

When the FCC was launched in 1934, backers argued that airwave scarcity justified its existence. In an age of information overload, with a nearly infinite array of media choices available to anyone with a mobile phone or broadband connection, no such argument can be made. Yet rather than shrinking, the FCC has ballooned, growing its budget by more than 60 percent between 1999 and 2009.

The FCC is one of many government agencies that an administration that cared about responsible, limited, unobtrusive government could eliminate in toto without anyone noticing.

To:  America’s Leading Pollers

From: Mitch Berg, Poll Consumer

Re:  Polls We Can Use.

Sirs,

Via your polling, it’s become a fairly common meme that about a quarter of Republicans have some degree of question about President Obama’s birth certificate (ranging from questions to outright doubt that he’s a citizen), while a little over a third of Democrats believe on some level that former President Bush had advance knowledge of 9/11 (ranging, again, from belief that the President should have reacted to a purported intelligence assessment declaring an attack likely by waiting Jack Bauer-like at the head of a team of Marines at Logan/Newark airports on that fateful morning, to belief that Bush pushed the plunger on a controlled demolition of the WTC and then fired a cruise missile at the Pentagon).

Interesting enough.

But it’s time to turn some new sod.  So I thought I’d turn to you, America’s leading poll jockeys, to find the information we really need.

How many Americans are…:

• Triggers:  How many people believe that Trig Palin is really Bristol Palin’s child, but Sarah is making noises about raising him to…well, I’m not sure what the conspiracy is supposed to say.  It is that addlepated.  Anyway – how many?
• Gaggers: How many Americans still parrot the inane trope the media is “really conservative”, and thus government intervention is needed to ensure enough liberal thoughts get heard?
• Warmers: How many of us believe, despite the exposure of the rampant bad science, bullying and crass politics  underpinning the theory of manmade global warming, that the science is “settled” and “past debate?”
• Toaders: What percentage of people think Helen Thomas is a credible journalist?
• Floozers: The same, but in re Maureen Dowd?
• Reporters: How many people still believe the Administration is “moderate?”
• Tinglers: What ratio of Americans don’t make derisive faces when Chris Matthews appears on the TV?  (See also:  Coopers)
• Dead-Airers: How many Americans still have “Air America” bumperstickers on their cars/bikes/dogs?
• Kruggers: How many people still mindlessly recite Paul Krugman’s infamous, innumerate, context-deprived trope about red states getting more tax money back than they put in?
• Healthers: Who still believes, after a year of fact to the contrary, that Obamacare will cover more people for less money?
• Dumpers: How many people believe that the external manifestations of Bachmann Derangement don’t help Sixth District rep Michele Bachmann’s electoral chances?
• Crashers: How many Americans believe that, despite the fact that government both actively legislated subprime mortgage lending and subsidized the obscene profits (and socialized the now-obvious risks), the current credit crisis is purely a result of free-enterprise and greed?

Thank you for your attention to this vital matter.

That, again, is all.

To: Taco Bell

From: Mitch Berg, Blogger

Re:  Shrimp Taco Ad

Sirs:

No.  There is no such thing as a “shrimp blogger”.

Please cease and desist.

Your prompt attention to this would be appreciated.

That is all.

So let’s say, hypothetically, that a guy were to find a deal on a scratch ‘n dent Thinkpad T60 laptop (1.8gHz Core Duo, 60GB HD, 11.a/b/g wireless) that ships with XP. 

Would you – hypothetically – keep running XP on it, or flip to Ubuntu?

I’m looking My friend is looking for pros and cons here.

…probably fifty years before CGI, when people actually had to do the impossible:

That’s The Ross Sisters, from 1944.  And it’s 90% amazing (especially the shot starting around 2:45), 10% kinda creepy.

(From my high school classmate Dena’s Facebook page)

I’ll cop to it; after last fall’s “Nobel Peace Prize” award to a president who, as of the award deadline, had done nothing to warrant it, and has done even less since, my self-esteem-respect as an American of Norwegian anscestry has taken a bit of a beating.

But it’s on days like today – the 67th anniversary of the Norwegian raid on the Vemork heavy-water plant at Ryukan, Norway – that I get a bit of that old Norse møjø back.

You may not have heard the story – largely because most American history teachers are illiterate about history, and partly because the font of all historical knowledge for most of them, Hollywood, transformed the event into an Anglo-American triumph (the atrocious Heroes of Telemark).

Like much of what you learn about “history” from Hollywood, it’s BS.

A little scientific and historical background:  nuclear reactors need something to “moderate” their fission reactions – i.e. to keep them under control.  The United States program used a mixture of Cadmium and Graphite.  The Germans, for reasons best explained by a physicist, chose Deuterium Oxide – aka “Heavy Water” – a compound found in infinitesimally tiny quantities in all water.  All you need to do is refine it out of all the regular water.

And in all of Europe in the early 1940s, there was exactly one facility that could refine bulk lots of Deuterium Oxide in the quantities a nuclear weapons program would need; the Vemork plant near the village of Rjukan, Norway.

Vemork

The British had wanted to attack the plant ever since they learned of its significance.  The British “Special Operations Executive” – a wartime organization that sat at the intersection of intelligence and special operations, much like “Special Operations Command” in the US does today, and whose American analogue, the “OSS”, became the anscestor of the CIA and US Special Forces – established an agent inside the plant (Einar Skinnarland) who smuggled out blueprints and paved the way.

Einar Skinnarland

In October of 1942, an SOE reconnaisance team with four more Norwegian operators (Jens Anton Poulsson, Arne Kjelstrup, Knut Haukelid and Claus Helberg), men who’d fled to the UK after the German invasion and undergone commando and intelligence training, were infiltrated into Norway to reconnoiter the area for a followup British commando raid.  The four men were air-dropped into a remote area far from Ryukan, and skied for days through the gathering mountain winter before they could even begin their mission.

A plan came together…

…and then completely unraveled.  The followup British commando raid to attack the plant failed catastrophically, with gliders and tow planes crashing in the snow and all the commandos either dying in the crashes or being caught and executed by the Gestapo, after revealing under torture the target of their raid.  The Germans reinforced Vemork, in case the Brits tried again.

The four-man recon team had to not only survive a mountain winter, but do it with an alerted enemy actively searching for them, and stay on the grid and able to assist the followup mission that had to come.

Later that winter, it fell to them and six more Norwegian commandos to finish the job.

The six commandos – Joachim Holmboe Rønneberg, Knut Haukelid, Fredrik Kayser, Kasper Idland, Hans Storhaug and Birger Strømsheim – dropped into Norway, linked up with Poulsson, Kjelstrup, Haugland and Helberg, and carried out the plan.

Bypassing the heavily-guarded bridge that ran 600 feet above the Maan River, the team descended from the plateu above into the river gorge, snuck across the icy stream, up a cable tunnel, and through a window.

Up for a bit of a climb?

They encountered a caretaker – who turned out to be a Norwegian who was happy to help.

The team placed the bombs – which destroyed the entire 1000-pound heavy-water supply – and escaped unscathed.  The Germans dispatched 3,000 troops to try to catch the commandos – but all escaped, with six of them staying in Norway to carry on the battle, and the other five skiing to Sweden to return to the UK to carry on the war.

Most of the team, after the war. Front: Poulsson, commander Leif Tronstad, Ronneberg. (Back) Storhaug, Kayser, Idland, Helberg, Stromsheim.

Being lucky and skillful, they all survived the war.

Being Norwegian, most of them lived long, healthy lives afterwards; all but Idland lived into the 1990’s; Poullson passed away this past February 2. Knut Haugland died this past Christmas; he was probably best-known to Americans, having participated in Thor Heyerdahl’s famous Kon Tiki expedition in the late forties. Joachim Rønneberg is still alive.

There are those who say, with some factual justification, that the German nuke program could never have caught up with the US program, even without the Vemork raid.

Perhaps.

Thanks to eleven brave underdogs and their mission, patched together against impossible odds, we never needed to even try to imagine what London and Moscow would look like as craters. (more…)

Roger Ebert tweeted:

@ebertchicago: How did this Obama/Telepromoter meme get started? Have many Presidents been in less need of one?

I’ll leave the responses to you, gentle reader.  It’s a rare open thread.

I sometimes wonder if Mitch realized what kind of co-blogger he was getting when he added me to SITD. My own late and unlamented blog was a bit all-over-the-place, veering from politics to pop culture to media fisking to wine & food. I’m pretty sure he was okay with all of that.

But then there was the less… usual… stuff. Like the time I faked my own death and came back as a gigantic mutant godzilla-like creature. Or the time I appointed a cute puppy as my ombudsman to deflect scandalous political fallout for an entirely made up political office. Not really sure Mitch intended that stuff to make the ol’ SITD transition. As of yet, I’ve not pushed the envelope to find out.

But if there’s one thing Mitch knew darned well he’d be getting when he signed me on to post over here its…
(more…)

I’ve joked, over the years, about how my native North Dakota is a maritime state, peopled by folks with salt water in their veins.  It’s partly a joke, of course – NoDak is pretty land-locked.  Not entirely a joke, of course; many of us are descended from the Vikings (not the ones that choke in the playoffs – the ones that made all your anscestors cry “uncle”).

But at least partly because North Dakota had a Coast Guard base.

For the past forty-odd years, thirteen of the loneliest coasties in the entire service have manned a LORAN transmitter near the little town of Lamoure.  The station broadcast a continuous signal with about four megawatts of power (most of our metro TV stations and bigger FM stations are 100,000 watts) to ships and planes around the world; in the days before GPS, it was the gold standard of electronic navigation.

Was.  The system was officially shut down this past Monday:

On Monday at 2000 GMT, the U.S. Coast Guard terminated the transmission of the LORAN-C radionavigation signal, marking the end of a system which has been an important factor in maritime navigation (and, to a lesser extent, air navigation) for more than half a century. The termination of LORAN was based on budget considerations and on the conclusion that LORAN’s functions have been supplanted by GPS. I’m not totally sure that this was a good decision.

LORAN was developed in World War II, and has served well.  But time and technology march on.  But progress doesn’t always progress, really:

Most LORAN users have now converted to GPS: however, there are signficant concerns about the increasing level of navigational dependency on this satellite-based system. For one thing, GPS signals are necessarily weak and can be jammed relatively easily. This was much less of a threat for LORAN because of the very high power (up to 4 megawatts) of its terrestrial transmitters.

So powerful, in fact, that they’d kill birds in flight near the towers.

Various proposals have been advanced for GPS backup systems, one of which involves radio signals transmitted from blimps. An alternative that was on the table was e-LORAN, involving the upgrade of the system’s accuracy to about 8 meters: indeed, significant money has already been invested in e-LORAN development. I’ve seen estimates that the cost of completing e-LORAN deployment would have been about $250MM, which is roughly the same amount of money being spent to dismantle the existing LORAN infrastructure. (LORAN operating costs were quite reasonable, about $35MM/yr.) I wouldn’t be surprised if whatever we wind up doing for GPS backup turns out to cost a lot more.

Of course, GPS developers have a lot more political clout than LORAN technicians, these days.

Anyway – bon voyage, LORAN!

So I’ve been playing guitar for a long time.  33 years next month, in fact.

And back when I was 14 and was just starting to play, “cheap” guitars were really, really awful.  By “cheap”, of course, I meant the kinds of guitar you found in department stores and catalogs for under about $200.  They had anemic electronics, terrible workmanship, necks that felt like polished telephone poles, and wouldn’t stay in tune for more than half a song.

The advent of the global economy, computer-assisted manufacturing and mass-marketing of musical instruments has had the sort of effect that the free market was supposed to; not only can you find guitars for under $300 today that rival the quality of some of the axes that went for $600 1980 dollars thirty years ago, but it’s even dragged up the quality of some of the few remaining knockoff brand guitars you can find at Target and WalMart, which aren’t professional-quality, but aren’t embarrassments either.

Anyway – I’ve been playing a long time now.  And that whole time, I’ve been playing three guitars:

• A mid-seventies Ibanez “Lawsuit” SG that I wrote about a while ago.  It’s my most recent purchase, by the way, in 1979.
• A 1960 Fender Jazz that’s been hotrodded way out of spec, and will be the subject of an upcoming HGF.  I got it for $150 in 1978.
• A “Ventura” acoustic I bought for paper route money when I was 14.  It was $140 in 1977, which made it kinda low-end, but it has a nice high-end tone that actually made it a decent recording guitar.  Needs some bridgework.

And so I’ve been thinking – maybe it’s time for a new toy?

I’m spurred somewhat by my kids.  I’ve been teaching them how to play.  Bun plays a Yamaha acoustic that she got for Christmas two years ago.  She’s picking it up at her own pace, and she’s not bad.

Zam?  He’s got mad hand-eye coordination; he’s picking it up real fast.  I got him a guitar – a little Jackson electric, on mind-warping special at Guitar Center before Chistmas – and a Peavey amp.  And he’s doing really good.  He could have some talent.

So the other day we went to Guitar Center – which, it occurred to me, was the first father-son “hobby” junket we’ve taken in many many years.

And we both fell in love with the same instrument; a tobacco-sunburst single-cutaway beauty with hot electronics, a gorgeous, smooth action, a slick neck, a dense but comfortable body…’

I looked at the headstock.  “Paul Reed Smith”.

“No wonder it played like a dream; it’s a Smith”.  I braced for sticker shock as I reached for the price tag.  Paul Reed Smiths are traditionally hand-made wonders that sell for well into four digits.

I looked.

Under $400.

Turns out Smith’s new SE line are factory-built guitars – and while a discerning guitarist can no doubt tell the difference between one of the hand-built high end models, the SEs are pure joy expressed in wood and wire.

So if I get a bonus this year…

Just saying.

DISCLOSURE:  Nobody paid me to write this.  But they sure could.

This blog has never “Endorsed” political candidates – because, like, who cares what I think? 

And Shot In The Dark generally only gets into showbiz as a snarky critic or, occasionally, fanboy.

As to some of showbiz’ glitzier diversions?  This blog generally keeps its own counsel.

But one of the great pleasures I’ve had on the Northern Alliance this past year has been interviewing Brook Kilgarriff, Miss Minnesota, twice, at the state fair and then just before Christmas at the studio.  She was a delightful interview; sharp, unflappable, and just plain good on the air.  “Wow” moment for me; at the State Fair, she was promoting her CD (to benefit the Children’s Miracle Network), and mentioned that she’s attenting the Boston Conservatory, majoring in Musical Theatre.  So I suggested – jokingly – that she sing something for us, never expecting that she’d actually sing something a capella in front of a crowd with no warning.

But she did.  And she killed!

So anyway – while this blog rarely if ever “endorses” anyone or anything, I do declare that we are openly and utterly in the bag for Brooke in tomorrow’s Miss America Pageant, which is tomorrow on TLC.

Here’s hoping she can do for Minnesota what Brett Favre couldn’t…

In all of the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers, there may be no blogger more persistent than Doug Bass of Crossword Bebop. Doug subtitles CBbop “Perhaps the first Anglospheric crossword blog”, and to my knowledge he’s exactly coirrect.

Eclectic? Heck yeah; you think posts about Sodoku written with archaic Cypriot syllabic alphabets grow on trees?

The Cypriot syllabary is a syllabic script used in Iron Age Cyprus, from ca. the 11th to the 4th centuries BCE, when it was replaced by the Greek alphabet. But it seems to have enough interest to have its own Unicode chart

And that, indeed, is what blogging’s supposed to be about; people writing about what grabs ’em in the liver!

So check out Doug at Crossword Bebop . Learn things you never knew you needed to know, and be glad you did!

British researchers have helped chimps produce their first video:

The apes created the movie using a specially designed chimp-proof camera given to them by primatologists.

The film-making exercise is part of a scientific study into how chimpanzees perceive the world and each other.

It will be screened within the Natural World programme “Chimpcam” shown on BBC Two at 2000GMT on Wednesday 27 January.

Hollywood’s production community, which is already losing thousands of jobs to Canada, is rapidly trying to unionize the primates.

Late word has it that both KTLK-FM and Janet Roberts’ “AM950” are trying to sign the chimps, pending figuring out their political sympathies.

To:  The Experts

From: Mitch Berg, Keen Observer

Re: Stop

Dear experts of the world,

Every single time there’s a major disaster, you solemnly intone that after three days, you’re not going to recover any survivers trapped beneath any rubble.

And every single time, you are wrong:

French rescue workers pulled a 24-year-old man alive from the rubble of a hotel in Haiti on Saturday, 11 days after an earthquake devastated much of the country.Wismond Jean-Pierre, who had no visible injuries but was severely dehydrated, was immediately loaded into an ambulance and taken to a hospital for treatment.

Lt. Col. Christophe Renou, a rescuer with the French team, called the three-hour effort “a miracle” as he was briefly overcome with emotion. Other members of the team — assisted by American and Greek workers — were seen weeping with joy following the rescue.

“This is God,” Frank Louvier, the chief of the French rescue team, said as he pointed to the sky.

Your lesson is clear, experts; shut up and dig.

That is all.

It’s on the agenda:

If seeing James Cameron’s boffo blockbuster special effects extravaganza Avatar doesn’t give you a 3-D induced headache, apparently it will give you thoughts of suicide instead:

The beautiful alien planet Pandora depicted in James Cameron’s ‘Avatar’ is so captivating that some audience members are becoming depressed and even suicidal when they fail to find meaning in real life after the film is over…

“I just watched avatar a few weeks ago and I’m feeling depressed and sad. It’s like I want to reach out and be in Pandora. I’d do anything to be in Pandora. I’ve tried so hard to dream about me being on Pandora but it hasn’t worked.”

“Ever since I went to see ‘Avatar’ I have been depressed. Watching the wonderful world of Pandora and all the Na’vi made me want to be one of them. I can’t stop thinking about all the things that happened in the film and all of the tears and shivers I got from it. I even contemplate suicide thinking that if I do it I will be rebirthed in a world similar to Pandora and the everything is the same as in ‘Avatar.'”

I’ll admit I felt the urge to grab a gun after seeing “Cool as Ice”, but I don’t think it involved the same motivations.

While there’s nothing amusing about the serious depression and social alienation that allows individuals to be driven to thoughts of suicide from a 3-D film with 2-D characters, Cameron’s opus isn’t the first nor the last work of science fiction to do so.  There’s Star Wars depression.  There’s Twilight depression.  Who knows, maybe even Mitch’s light posting this morning caused a few cases of SITD withdrawal.

But regardless of the source, the causes for such depression from a work of fiction seem as much culturally based as personality-driven:

Tamara Nichols, who practiced psychotherapy for 11 years, says, “[The genre] can provide a sort of a symbolic model for people who don’t fit into the more mainstream ideas of what a man should be, what a woman should be.”

…it seems that many people who read science fiction as children had similar experiences: raised outside their mother countries, moved frequently, had health problems, troubled childhoods, and/or were academically gifted. These circumstances led these people to delve more deeply into books than to reach out to other people.

A multitude of critics as varied as the floral and fawna on Cameron’s fictional Pandora have expounded on the political and social messages that Avatar and its appeal suggest.  But regardless of the film’s real or accidental messages (and Cameron leaves little doubt about environmental intentions of the movie), the concept that Avatar’s appeal is largely what filmmakers 50 years used to call a “sword and sandal spectacle” is seemingly too timid a conclusion for some to be willing to reach.  What would columnists and bloggers have to write about without broad, overreaching conclusions on social phenomena?  Especially when your protagonists are giant blue cat people.

Maybe that’s the real underlying message of Avatar – millions of people are secretly suicidal furries.

It’s high time we threw a MOB Winter Party.

The MOB has always thrown its parties at Keegans, largely because the group really was born at Keegans; Terry Keegan has always shown bloggers (and, let’s be honest, the Northern Alliance) a lot of love, and it’s only right to show it right back  What kind of person doesn’t take care of his/her friends, especially friends who’ve been under attack by people as venal and stupid as Minneapolis’ city government?

And rest assured, this coming summer at Keegans, with the cigar patio open, will be fantastic, and I’m looking forward to throwing a MOB event and more than a few Blogger Trivia Nights at the Northeast Minneapolis hangout.

But given that it’s the dead of winter, and MOB parties tend to draw so well, it’s time to expand the horizons just a little.  We have another establishment that’s on the plate here that not is not only run by one of the good guys, and not only faces a dismal, short-sighted, nanny-statist city government, but has a good-sized indoor party room that’s gonna be nice for a big, indoor party.  They have no cigar patio – but face it, in this weather only North Dakotans sit on patios to smoke cigars.

More details later.  But suffice to say, a MOB part is in the works, very very presently.

Stay tuned.

It’s a good thing we only end decades every ten years.   The endless round of “looking back at the decade” stories inflicted on us takes a good chunk of the joy out of the new year.

Of course, this past ten  years has been a time of massive changes, socially and politically and, of course, technologically.

Huffpo ran a list earlier this week of the “12 Things That Became Obsolete This Decade“.  And it’s a mixed bag of good and bad news. 

I won’t quote the Huffpo piece – you can click the link for all of the giggly, not-one-degree-behind-the-vacuous-trend-curve snarkiness you could want.  But the list itself is interesting, more or less:

Calling (onthe phone):  The text message, they say, is replacing the phone call.  Huge net loss.  Unless you’re stuck in a meeting, text messaging sucks chunks through a straw.  It’s slow (yeah, yeah, I know, kids today can text 200 wpm, but I guarantee you we can all talk even faster), it degrades language, and in the end it dehumanizes us all; it’s such a natural progression on the way to Duckspeak, I’m amazed nobody else has brought it up.  Verdict: Unambiguously Bad.

Classifieds:   I’ll cop to it; I jumped on the Craigs List bandwagon with both feet.  Sorry, newspapers; technology wins.  The buyer needs to beware, but no moreso than with classifieds – and you can at least read Craigslist (and Twin Cities Free Market) without a magnifying glass.   Verdict: Acceptable.

Dial-up Internet:   Creaky?  Unreliable?  Begone.  Verdict: Unambiguously good.

Encyclopedias:   Yeah, I know, Google is fast and ubiquitous and everywhere.  And the various online encyclopedias, including Wikipedia, have pretty much slurped up the market.  But we’re raising a generation of kids who have absolutely no idea how to find information that doesn’t respond to a three word search string.  In a generation, the art and skill of finding information that isn’t parsed, indexed and Google-ready will be even more concentrated in the hands of the very, very few (I’m talking lawyers, here) than it already is.  Verdict: Neutral-to-bad.

CDs:   I hated CDs when they came out.  Compared to well-cared-for-vinyl, CDs – especially DDD CDs (material that was recorded, mastered and delivered digitally) sounded cold, harsh and teutonic.  I’m not alone in thinking this; one of the big stories this past year or two in music technology has been the comeback of vinyl, with its warm, human-sounding frequency response.  And I still want to find all those bobbleheads from the eighties who were saying “CDs are indestructible, and they will never skip!”; on the balance, I have found CDs to be much, much less reliable than well-cared-for vinyl.  And I’m no audiophile (although as I buy more classical music, I could easily become one); for casual music listening, the MP3 is just fine. Verdict: Good riddance.

Landline Phones:   As little as I like text messaging, I like cell phones even less. Why?  Because you’re always “on” when you have a cell phone; you have to make a considered action to drop off the grid.  And worst of all, cell phones are small, usually dark-colored, and easily lost.  You can not lose a landline phone.  After my little fracas with the garage last summer – where I had to race downstairs to try to find my cell phone, which it took me a second or two to remember I’d left in the handlebar-bag on my bike – I reaffirmed my belief; people need landlines.  Verdict: A cursed wolf in blessing-y sheep’s clothing.

Film:   The film camera, in theory, is similar to the CD.  Digital cameras – at least, the ones I will ever be able to afford – are basically scanners.  They sweep their field of view for the data in their response range, and plunk it, according to an automagic algorithm, into memory.  It has none of the warmth or idiosyncrasy of film, the use of which is itself an art form.  My daughter – who inherited the family photography gene, and is quite talented at the art of composing and lighting a shot – vastly prefers good old film for doing real photography, in the same way that I love analog music.  But who am I kidding?  If I remembered to take film to the store to be developed, it was a minor miracle.  The digital camera fills the niche of the old 110 cameras, without the whole ‘pick up the film” hasslte.  Verdict: Ambiguously good with a big asterisk.

Yellow Pages:   I always hated trying to parse the phone company’s logic in parsing and sorting the content in the Yellow Pages.  Verdict: Unalloyed Blessing.

Catalogs:   I never read catalogs.  Verdict: Who cares.

Fax Machines:   I hated, hated, hated fax machines.  Always.  Fussy, temperamental, slow, with an action-to-feedback loop an order of magnitude beyond the attention span  I devote t o “sending documents”, I learned to detest the buzzing, beeping, paper-shredding, hidden-code-dependent monstrosities.  Especially when I was working as a contractor; I’d fax my invoices to whomever was collecting them, and run about my business, and find out a day later that something, somewhere in the chain, had squibbed, leaving me scrambling to make sure I got paid on time…Grrr.  Hate ’em.  Verdict: Yaaaay!

Wires:   Wires, they say, are obsolete.  Wireless will replace it all, they say.  But after six years of wrestling with anomalous propagation, signal quirks and hardware and user-interface bumfuzzlery, I’m very, very unconvinced.  And you just know  the Center for Science in the Public Interest is going to find that wireless causes cancer, don’t you?  Verdict: Get back to me in ten years, trekkie.

Hand-written letters:   Ugh.  There’s something so nice about a hand-written letter.  Unless it’s from me.  Between my ADD and decades of bad habits ranges from an unintelligible scrawl to, if I’m paying attention, a painfully slow all-cap script that looks like it was written by an addled first-grader.  On the other hand, I type 70 WPM, and still do it with style.  Verdict: I’m so sorry, but I’m totally there.

Thoughts are solicited.

Rules we all can live by:

Although it’ll take restraint…